The Coming Loop

Neither this author nor most other sane people I know claim that the code or architecture these "loops" produce is great. In fact, the author explains how it is not great. His point is rather, that we'll increasingly see a world in which code quality and maintainability by humans will cease to matter for a lot of codebases.

There might be many software companies in the future which successfully sell software products which were created without a single software developer being involved in its development or maintenance. The code might be bloated and bad - but it doesn't matter because machines can still create and maintain it cheaper and faster than people can.

I already see this happening at a small scale at the place where I work. Product managers with zero coding ability are attempting to create entire new product features on their own using Claude or Codex. We do not let them merge this stuff unsupervised but in some corners and in new repositories they are publishing stuff that they have barely spoken about with a developer. They are just doing it. We'll see more of that.

His slide showed Opus 4.6 saying "walk". I couldn't get 4.6 to do that.

I don’t know. I’ve invested heavily in building internal tools that scaffold code and lint the filled in architecture/code design. That with a ratchet pattern, to allow for new rules that have errors across the existing code base, but to asymptotically fix them, is working pretty well.

Example - all modules have tightly scoped design primitives (I’m using hexagonal architecture for the backend, for example). And all code has BDD tests, which is what I spend much of my time reviewing, since cases written in human sentences is easier than looking at so many files of code.

There is a relentless upkeep to draft rules that respond to the workarounds the agents come up with to adhere to the design I want, but it’s slowly approaching perfect. What has helped here tremendously is I use hooks to llm as a judge the decisions the llms make, and then have them review/raise the questionable ones after a first pass is completed. In general, this is snuffing out the slop effectively.

All to say, someone asked me recently what model I prefer. In this approach, the model doesn’t really matter to me because the code is consistently what I want. I’ll choose a model because it has better mcp speed (codex), or a more thorough scope (Claude code).

Where this IS true is when we’re building a net new pattern. The agents are not great at it. BUT most code can fit into the few patterns I’ve created, and what can’t you lock down a new pattern to enforce over a couple iterations of it. Almost everything, at least in SaaS, follows a template.

What that means to me is that there is a balance. My belief is that we have to take some of the new power and put it towards quality rather than spend it all on speed.

Edit: woah!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGgve4L2zY4