So no human in the loop then? Sounds like a recipe for tech debt…
I currently need 4gb of RAM MINIMUM to send an email. AI didn't get us here.
No, but it does learn from where we are. If where we are is debt, debt is where we'll remain.
My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents
41–50 of 65 posts
Re: My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents
#42Re: My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents
#43>My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. When you start getting good results from agents you soon realize you are the bottleneck. Automating the verification of the code is the way to go, otherwise it's just not worth it. It takes longer to read and understand code than to write code, so why bother with agents if you are…
At the moment I do it manually, but I've experimented with having claude code explicitly call out to codex headlessly for adversarial review, and it works great, I just prefer being able to interact with codex during the review.
If you want even greater fun, launch claude and codex in the same working tree and make them fight it out in real time.
Re: My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I currently need 4gb of RAM MINIMUM to send an email. AI didn't get us here.
Sure, but AI is trained on the code that got us here isn't it? Do you think that we're going to use less RAM with AI produced code?
"Do not use react. Do not use tailwind. We will not deploy on vercel."
and suddenly things work again, it's magic!
Re: My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents
#45I keep posting this but it keeps being relevant. I had an agent implement a feature completely backwards. It wrote a whole bunch of tests proving the correctness of the implementation. All the tests passed. The really interesting thing to me is that formal verification wouldn't have helped there either -- it would have just written a mathematical proof of the correctness of the backwards feature.
What do you mean by "completely backwards"?
In test-driven development, you're supposed to write out the tests first to specify the desired behavior, then write the code to confirm to that.
Re: My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bob Martin has built a career on asking the wrong questions. He is doing the same here as well.
I think Uncle Bob worship by OOP adherents is crazy, but I also think dismissing him this way is also crazy. His work on popularizing methods for writing good OOP is solid. But at the end of the day, he's a guy with a long career in programming, which makes him significantly better than the median, but it doesn't make him three sigma above. In this case, he's got a pretty good short- to medium-term argument that if y…
You just have to make maintainability and readability explicit criteria at the strategic level and hold the AI accountable yourself, same as with testing and linting and the tactical level. Fable can generate code that is absolutely readable by a middle school kid, it'll just be less efficient at it than full jargon-laced fanciness, so finding the sweet spot isn't too hard.
Re: My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents
#47I keep posting this but it keeps being relevant. I had an agent implement a feature completely backwards. It wrote a whole bunch of tests proving the correctness of the implementation. All the tests passed. The really interesting thing to me is that formal verification wouldn't have helped there either -- it would have just written a mathematical proof of the correctness of the backwards feature.
What do you mean by "completely backwards"?
I think he means it was very wrong.
Re: My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents
#48Right now there is about a 95% chance that when I manually review an agent's code I find nothing that needs changing. I find it plausible that an extra agentic review pass and more testing can bring this number up to the point that one never needs to review code again. AI writes pretty good code nowadays. (You still need to be diligent and decide the architecture during the planning, and read the gotchas and "things…
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Re: My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents
#49Focusing on the surrounding other than the code itself is not good strategy or behavior.
Giving up reviewing code is not strategy, but because:
Review AI code line by line is like watch movies frame by frame, and is impossible, very difficult, terribly boring, or abandoned sooner or later.
Re: My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents
#50I keep posting this but it keeps being relevant. I had an agent implement a feature completely backwards. It wrote a whole bunch of tests proving the correctness of the implementation. All the tests passed. The really interesting thing to me is that formal verification wouldn't have helped there either -- it would have just written a mathematical proof of the correctness of the backwards feature.
Wait, did you let the same agent write the tests that wrote the implementation? Or was it that the plan was the wrong way round, and both the generator of code and the generator of the tests followed that same incorrect plan?
Also, what were your mechanisms for reviewing the plan against the described business outcome? Anything else you could have done there to catch the backwardness?
And finally, did you run any of it across models from different foundation labs? I'll often run important stuff generated by codex across Anthropic, grok, and Gemini with an opus or fable judge...