moltar

In some Slavic languages it means “poopoo”.

It can’t be CO2 because they said it refills itself.

But was the code of high quality or a mess?

Because I noticed people at my work did similar requests to improve CI. The result was a faster CI, but full of cludges huge inline bash scripts in workflow YAML files, and effectively unmaintainable, unreviewable mess. After just a few rounds of these optimizations the entire CI setup is basically a Rube Goldberg machine but made of duct tape.

Maybe it depends on what you are working on. I work on platforms and engineering tooling. I cannot say the agent can be trusted yet in my experience. And I’d say I’m pretty advanced agent user compared to my peers. The majority of the work I do I have to steer and correct a lot.

For example, recently I’ve been adding skills for our team. I added evals. If you ask an agent to make evals it’ll always try to bias and overfit just to make tests pass. No matter if I have it stated in every possible place not to do it and Codex instructed to catch these cases. It doesn’t work. Lots of sloppy evals get written and skills get extremely specific instructions to pass specific tests.

I think if you are implementing trivial features in a green field product it can work to some degree for some time. But eventually it’s going to deteriorate into a mess. Death by 1000 paper cuts.

I think it’s much more simple than that. It comes down to caring.

I’ve had a long discussion with a coworker on a long drive.

What we came to realize is the difference in our attitude towards writing code.

I approach it as craft. Even when I’m doing 100% of my coding with an agent these days. I still care about the result to be of high quality and maintainability. I still use my system design knowledge to guide the agent to produce scalable systems.

He treats it like just a job. If it’s good enough he ships. The edge cases and bugs don’t matter. Can be fixed later.

But in my mind that’s a fallacy. We all know things don’t get fixed later unless they are obvious defects and users complain.

Instead we get slow degradation of overall quality. All those small issues compound overtime to create a brittle systems that is difficult to debug and maintain.

My mental model of software engineering is like this. Each commit/PR is a small LEGO block. If you make them well they’ll snap well and create a stable structure that can withstand forces. If every LEGO block you make is just slightly off here and there. Your structure becomes unstable and will always have faults and will always have failures under unpredictable environmental pressures.

I think ICQ was from Israel.

I just use Fable for reviews of specs and code then hand off to Opus to work on. Works well.

For how many people?

I’m not advocating ketone supplements. Your body produces ketones by itself.

I’m not advocating a carnivore diet nor eat like that. Had croissants today! But it’s true that people of the north do not eat carbs as they simply do not exist there.

I don’t know how true that is. But I read a theory somewhere that people developed bigger brains when they started eating more fish which contains omega 3s.

That’s false. Carbs are not a requirement for human body. Proof of that are native populations living far north, exclusively off of animal food sources.

Human body prefers ketones as a source of energy. But glycogen is faster.

My simplified mental model is like this. Ketones are normal gasoline. And glycogen is racing fuel (ethanol). If you run a stock car on racing fuel it may start and drive for a while but it’s damaging the engine and creates unnecessary wear.

Body’s preferred food source is ketones. It functions most optimally when using ketones.

But the fastest accessible energy source is glycogen, which comes from carbs.

I address it with AI.

Write REVIEW.md.

I have CC check itself pretty well.

I also put into agent/claude/review instructions to write using simple English skill and humanizer skill. Then not to write redundant comments.

It’s not perfect but definitely catches lots of slop.