neilkakkar
Joined 8 years ago
Karma
1,336
Submissions
263
Member since
May 29
https://neilkakkar.com/
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Comment · 7 months ago
I see what you mean - I have a setup-worktree script that does this, but I use the skill for knowing when to do bits and pieces. I would agree, if it were 100% deterministic script is much better.
Comment · 7 months ago
I think you'd like this post I wrote: https://neilkakkar.com/agentic-debt.html , parts of why I think we wouldn't get automated away just yet. It might be true eventually - and when it does happen, I'm sure I'll find something else to do, most probably up the stack. Managing for now seems like a terrible task for agents. I need to guide them to the right solution.
_Parts_ of what I write are drudgery, which gets automated away. The "why" we talk about in sync, so it's much less of an issue in general.
When I say management, I mean more like a staff engineer or a tech lead, rather than a traditional manager.
Comment · 7 months ago
This is exactly why I use a custom skill - I can tell it what to focus on, I can give it a ill formatted blurb of why I'm making the changes, and it will format it nicely, and add more context based on the changes.
Most of the time, the PR descriptions it generates for me are great.
I think the issue is you're assuming it's always a poor output, which isn't the case. I'm in a much smaller team than you'd expect, so the why is talked about sync more often than not, and it becomes less of an problem.
Comment · 7 months ago
OP here, I disagree, it's great to have a skill for cases where you have extra steps and want the agent to run some verification steps before making a PR. It's called making a PR, but it's not _just_ running the gh cli to make a PR.
It's checking if I'm in a worktree, renames branches accordingly, adds a linear ticket if provided, generates a proper PR summary.
I'm not optimising for how fast the PR is created, I want it to do the menial steps I used to do .
Comment · 7 months ago
Hello! OP here, a lot of comments have this common theme of wondering if this is overloading / context switching / the brain thrashing.
Helped me surface an important distinction on why it doesn't really happen for me. I think there's three parts to it:
1. I work on only one thing at a time, and try to keep chunks meaty
2. I make sure my agents can run a lot longer so every meaty chunk gets the time it deserves, and I'm not babysitting every change in parallel, that would be horrible! (how I do this is what this post focuses on)
3. New small items that keep coming up / bug fixes get their own thread in the middle of the flow when they do come up, so I can fire and forget, come back to it when I have time. This works better for me because I'm not also thinking about these X other bugs that are pending, and I can focus on what I'm currently doing.
What I had to figure out was how to adapt this workflow to my strengths (I love reviewing code and working on one thing at a time, but also get distracted easily). For my trade-offs, it was ideal to offload context to agents whenever a new thing pops up, so I continue focusing on my main task.
The # of PRs might look huge (and they are to me), but I'm focusing on one big chonky thing a day, the others are smaller things, which together mean progress on my product is much faster than it otherwise would be.
Comment · 7 months ago
Interesting, I feel humans are a lot more likely to consolidate because it's easier to reason / maintain when there's one component vs two.
Agree that it's _possible_ people don't do it, and things end up in a decaying codebase. But in my experience people tend to leave things better than they found them (or that's the culture I like to promote, at least when dealing with humans)
Comment · 3 years ago
I'm very confused, why is this so upvoted, someone mind explaining?
Comment · 4 years ago
Asking because I see something that's a lot of mappings with zero context: Why/ for what is the Lambda-Cube useful?