Viewing profile — jtbetz22

I'm continuing to focus on ways to set strong code quality guardrails in an era where most code is not handwritten. The result is http://getcaliper.dev . It has a number of mechani…

According to Bloomberg[1] construction of the first phase of the second avenue subway cost about 2.5B USD per mile. At that rate, even if you just look at extending the A/C/E from …

I believe that AI-powered software development means we need to fundamentally rethink how we preserve code quality. Model output volumes mean that code review only as a final check…

Oh this is really useful. There's definitely a problem to be solved here. agent guidance files, like all forms of documentation, can quickly grow stale. I've tried to tackle a simi…

> So even when you have a nicely structured commit history, you end up realizing that some things need to be changed and start appending a bunch of "fix" and "actual fix" commits a…

Maintaining (and, ideally, improving!) code quality is, IMO, the biggest open problem in agentic development. I've been coming at this from a slightly different angle, building a s…

This is really cool. In general I think there has been (a) too little utilization of the hooks provided by agents for deterministic checks and follow-ups to agentic coding, and (b)…

I find it is now 1000x more effective to draft documents in collaboration with Claude, working with a markdown file as the output format. However, git doesn't work in my team as a …

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415402

Interesting. I don't know if people are trusting AI-generated code too much, but AI is generating way more code than humans can review, and the 'looks fine' bar is what the AI gets…

At my company, we ask everyone in the hiring process about how they have used any kind of agentic coding tools. We're not concerned about hiring for the 'skill' of using these thin…

I have been ~obsessed~ with exactly this problem lately. We built AI code generation tools, and suddenly the bottleneck became code review. People built AI code reviewers, but none…

This is a real problem. Hopsule looks interesting. IIUC, the core of your approach is that decisions get locked as immutable constraints and then served to agents via MCP when they…

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The architectural drift problem you're describing is exactly what I see with AI-assisted development — agents move fast but conventions slip. I built Caliper to catch that at the h…

Yeah, this is a common problem, I have been thinking about it a fair bit. I ran into a related problem at scale though: deterministic linters catch syntax and obvious anti-patterns…

I am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from other high-tier CS schoo…

Agentic code construction has broken traditional models for code review - the volume is just too high for humans to keep up with. There are some good tools out there for automating…

I am old enough to remember when it was 15-199, taught by Steven Rudich, titled "How to think like a computer scientist". They had to run it for a few years before they realized CS…

Oh wow, I appreciate this post as vivid reminder for how I grew to loathe being an EM at Google. Folks like this are pervasive in the org these days.

https://www.tabomagic.com I've been obsessed with making it easier to handle tab overload in the browser without requiring any sort of active "tab management". I have a working ext…

Krapivin's work was a result of his study of the Tiny Pointers paper; his paper has already been linked in another response.

This is a fun read, and, unlike a lot of material on the Labs, goes back a lot further than 1947. As a software engineer, my favorite book on the topic is "Unix: A History and a Me…

This post reflects an insidious anti pattern in the practice of setting OKRs: "shipping the roadmap" is not the objective, it is a means to achieving some other underlying objectiv…