No Coding Before 10am

Don't worry so much about spee. Some people obsess over it and don't realize they are running in the wrong direction.

We don't have enough context here really. For simple changes, sure - 10min is plenty. But imagine you actually have a big spec ready, with graphical designs, cucumber tests, integration tests, sample data, very detailed requirements for multiple components, etc. If the tests are well integrated and the harness is solid, I don't see a reason not to let it go for a couple hours or more. At some point you just can't implement things using the agent in a few simple iterations. If it can succeed on a longer timeline without interruption, that may be actually a sign of good upfront design.

To be clear, this is not a hypothetical situation. I wrote long specs like that and had large chunks of services successfully implemented up to around 2h real-time. And that was limited by the complexity of what I needed, not by what the agent could handle.

> Does it need an article for saying it?

Not for nothing but The Art of War includes really insightful quotes like "If you do not feed your soldiers, they will die."

Yeah, AI generated diagrams can be pretty hit or miss. The lack of good quality examples in training data and minimal documentation for these tools can make it difficult for models to even get basic syntax correct for more complex diagrams.

I’ve had a lot of success dogfooding my own product, the Mermaid Studio plugin for JetBrains IDEs (https://mermaidstudio.dev).

It combines the deep semantic code intelligence of an IDE with a suite of integrated MCP tools that your preferred agent can plug into for static analysis, up to date syntax, etc.

I basically tell Claude Code to run the generated diagram through the analysis tool, fix issues it detects and repeat until fixed. Then generate a png or svg for a visual inspection before finalizing the diagram.

Now all of my planning and architecture docs are filled with illustrative flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and occasionally block diagrams for workshopping proposed UI layouts

You can expand it beyond novel applications. The models aren't good enough for autonomous coding without a human in the loop period.

They can one shot basic changes and refactors, or even many full prototypes, but for pretty much everything else they're going to start making mistakes at some point. Usually very quickly. It's just where the technology is right now.

The thing that frustrates me is that this is really easy to demonstrate. Articles like this are essentially hallucinations that, at least many, people mystifyingly take seriously.

I assume the reason they get any traction is that a lot of people don't have enough experience with LLM agents yet to be confident that their personal experience generalizes. So they think maybe there are magical context tricks to get the current generation of agents to not make the kinds of mistakes they're seeing.

There aren't. It doesn't matter if it's Opus 4.6 in Claude Code or Codex 5.3 xhigh, they still hallucinate, fail to comprehend context and otherwise drift.

Anyone who can read code can fire up an instance and see this for themselves. Or you can prove it for free by looking at the code of any app that the author says was vibecoded without human review. You won't have to look very hard.

Agents can accomplish impressive things but also, often enough, they make incomprehensibly bad decisions or make things up. It's baked into the technology. We might figure out how to solve that problem eventually, but we haven't yet.

You can iterate, add more context to AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md, add skills, setup hooks, and no matter how many times you do it the agents will still make mistakes. You can make specialized code review agents and run them in parallel, you can have competing models do audits, you can do dozens of passes and spend all the tokens you want, if it's a non trivial amount of code, doing non trivial things, and there's no human in the loop, there will still be critical mistakes.

No one has demonstrated different behavior, articles and posts claiming otherwise never attempt to prove that what they claim is actually possible. Because it isn't.

Just to be clear, I think coding agents are incredibly useful tools and I use them extensively. But you can't currently use them to write production code without a human in the loop. If you're not reading and understanding the code, you're going to be shipping vulnerabilities and tech debt.

Articles like this are just hype. But as long as they keep making front pages they'll keep distorting the conversation. And it's an otherwise interesting conversation! We're living through an unprecented paradigm shift, the field of possibilities is vast and there's a lot to figure out. The idea of autonomous coding agents is just a distraction from that, at least for now.