191–200 of 532 posts
I don't think AI will ever solve this problem. It will never be more than a tool in the arsenal. Probably the best tool, but a tool nonetheless.
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Works better than standard claude / gpt, which doesn't do red-green-refactor. Doesn't seem like slop when it meaningfully changes the results for the better, consistently. Really is a game-changer. You should consider trying it.
I do do TDD but using skills in this way is an anti-pattern for a multitude of reasons.
This is in fact precisely what skills is meant for and is the opposite of an anti-pattern, but more like best practice now. It's explicitly using the skills framework precisely how it was meant to be used.
Not a rhetoric question. Trillion token burners and such.
It's currently burning through the TESTING.md backlog: https://github.com/alpeware/datachannel-clj
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Yep, tests written after the fact are just verifying tautologies. > Most teams don't [write tests first] because thinking through what the code should do before writing it takes time they don't have. It's astonishing to me how much our industry repeats the same mistakes over and over. This doesn't seem like what other engineering disciplines do. Or is this just me not knowing what it looks like behind the curtain of…
When push comes to shove, software can usually be fudged. Unlike a building or a water treatment plant where the first fuck up could mean that people die. I like to think that people writing actual mission critical software try their absolute best to get it right before shipping and that the rest our industry exists in a totally separate world where a bug in the code is just actually not that big of a deal. Yeah, it…
Am I supposed to be impressed by this? I think people are now just using agents for the sake of it. I'm perfectly happy running two simple agents, one for writing and one for reviewing. I don't need to go be writing code at faster than light speed. Just focusing on the spec, and watching the agent as it does its work and intervening when it goes sideways is perfectly fine with me. I'm doing 5-7x productivity easily,…
No. But it is noteworthy. A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI. (Granted, everything SWEs complained about being tedious.)
From the customer’s perspective, waiting for buggy code tomorrow from San Francisco, buggy code tonight from India or buggy code from an AI at 4AM aren’t super different for maybe two thirds of use cases.
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> But even better, tell it to create subagents to form red team, green team and refactor team while the main instance coordinates them, respecting the clean-room rules. It really works. It helps, but it definitely doesn't always work, particularly as refactors go on and tests have to change. Useless tests start grow in count and important new things aren't tested or aren't tested well. I've had both Opus 4.6 and Code…
The trick is, with the setup I mentioned, you change the rewards. The concept is: Red Team (Test Writers), write tests without seeing implementation. They define what the code should do based on specs/requirements only. Rewarded by test failures. A new test that passes immediately is suspicious as it means either the implementation already covers it (diminishing returns) or the test is tautological. Red's ideal outco…
One thing I've been wrestling with building persistent agents is memory quality. Most frameworks treat memory as a vector store — everything goes in, nothing gets resolved. Over time the agent is recalling contradictory facts with equal confidence. The architecture we landed on: ingest goes through a certainty scoring layer before storage. Contradictions get flagged rather than silently stacked. Memories that get rec…
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You guys are describing wonderful things, but I've yet to see any implementation. I tried coding my own agents, yet the results were disappointing. What kind of setup do you use ? Can you share ? How much does it cost ?
If you are not spending 5-10k dollars a month for interesting projects, you likely won't see interesting results
You pay more to try and get above that noise and hope you'll reach an actual human.
The new "fast mode" that burns tokens at 6 times the rate is just scary because that's what everyone still soon say we all need to be using to get results.
I call this "Test Theatre" and it is real. I wrote about it last year: https://benhouston3d.com/blog/the-rise-of-test-theater You have to actively work against it.