dhorthy

(op here btw) - the question isn't "can models make code better" - its "left fully unattended, will they turn your codebase to slop over time" from the footnotes (sorry if thi…

the thesis of the post is that this is not true. fable can solve more problems but for complex systems it is not sufficiently diligent that you can turn the lights off.

that's probably part of it but every enterprise in the world (even teams as small as 10-20 engineers) are paying per token, not with subscriptions. Claude code did make it into those orgs because…

awesome - i have updated the post with a link to this thread!

yeah my best articulation of taste is something i got from Jake Nations[1] while he was still at netflix - "you know a bad pattern when you see it because at some point you were up at 2am debuggi…

we out here trying

it is absolutely wild to me that this keeps floating to top comment thread when the guy very clearly did not read even the first half

> I spent a week or so and like a billion+ tokens trying to refactor and save it. It just wasn't worth it. this is exactly what happened to github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer - it was …

one thing I probably didn't mention is we do the program design having already done an in-depth codebase research, with current patterns and architecture surfaced - that actually seeds every step…

and build it incrementally! You don't have to build the entire software factory at once. You don't have to mastermind the whole future system, instead you're actually stacking and layer…

I have had the phrase "programming is building a theory" spinning in my head for days, especially since watching this pragmatic engineer pod with Kent Beck https://www.youtube.com…

> Historically I know that the majority maintenance problems occur from slow continuous evolution of a system that it initially was never designed for. And the only way to address this was continuo…

appreciate that context! I definitely did not mean to come out and say "its definitely not working" or anything, but would love to hear from y'all a retrospective on the ~5-6 month anni…

this is 100% right. you have to guard the codebase patterns with your life. because the codebase is part of the prompt.

> In order for coding with LLMs to go well, there has to be more rigor, more discipline, more good engineering hard-assedness. To reiterate, the teams seeing the best results with AI were already h…

yes exactly

i can't tell if this is a compliment or not

yeah i like this and others in the thread mentioned that understanding RL and RLHF and the shape of the data is really important (at least the fundamentals, I'm sure there's quite complex in…

blake smith has a really good post on this - that mental alignment among the team is the primary purpose of code review - https://blakesmith.me/2015/02/09/code-review-es…

yeah that was another thing i hoped would pour through here - that deterministic systems are much better for evaluating quality (test, linters, cyclomatic complexity, etc) - but that we don't hav…

fair point, this is the thing I struggled most to extract out while writing it - if you can propose an RL environment that penalizes a model for bad design, then I'm all ears - right now there&#x…

yeah I 100% agree - and I think the most popular coding agent workflows / skill kits are designed to pull those insights and intuition out of humans in a way that optimizes for the developer&#x…

normative specifications can help, but the thesis here is that specs that define behavior of the product or even architecture are helpful but there's MORE that can be done and even though "p…

interesting - i'd say my main goal is to put the current "agentic software factory" hype in the historical context of "we've actually been rube-goldberging software deploys fo…

yeah this is along the lines of what some friends of mine call "core vs. pragmatic modules" or even s/modules/codebase zones/ the idea that if you have a solid core and decoup…

my perhaps controversial take is that opus 4.1 was smarter than 4.5 for complex engineering work, but 4.5 was faster and "squishier" - it responded better to simpler prompts, it read between…

this is cool tech and i like the use case but I'm always afraid of building against these internal JSONL apis that claude code uses since they change all the time / not a formal product inte…