bhackett

OK thanks, agents definitely like partial implementations like that. When this impacts users we need to be able to observe that and see the bug, then track it back to its source. Weird logic bugs like this benefit from having a good debugger to untangle things and get to the root of the problem, especially when there is tons of code.

If you're happy with your agent's performance using surface level o11y to track down issues then that's fine. This is what pretty much the entire industry is doing and it does usually work! QA focuses on root causes because it can look through the app's entire execution and provide evidence so your agent doesn't need to guess when figuring out what the fix is. That guesswork is what we're trying to eliminate, for when the surface level stuff doesn't clearly point at the problem.

What sort of bugs do you have in mind? From our perspective there are many kinds of bugs that inhibit UX (and AX) but they can be subtle issues like poorly designed flows. It's hard for an agent to notice or understand these but they are serious problems and we're trying to surface these more readily.

Agents that are blind to understanding the problem they created will definitely not be able to fix it. Our argument is that we can fix that blindness with better observability. For better or for worse, even if the code is messy, if an agent can see what is going on it can keep things together and get the app into working shape. 100% human written too btw...

I think AX is just as important in that case though, as even a patient agent will make mistakes and will have a lot more trouble getting things done right when using a buggy app.

There's an opportunity here to bend things towards quality and efficiency moreso than mere volume of code. The agent has to be able to effectively repair and maintain what it has been building though.

Convoluted code is definitely a problem, I don't think it's unique to AI though. It also becomes more manageable with a time travel debugger as the actual behavior is easy to understand.

(OP) I completely agree! AI is amazing at writing web apps that are full of bugs, but it also gives us what we need to turn that completely around. That's what we're trying to make happen...

Yeah, we allow importing projects so you can fix bugs you've encountered elsewhere, but we want to streamline the app building process and the UX used in v0/Bolt etc is already really well done. We want this app building to be more reliable though, it's easy to hit bugs that prevent progression.

We're also interested in using our API with MCP so that e.g. Cursor could be used to fix bugs you're seeing locally, and plan to explore that angle before long.