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I don't abandon the code to the agent entirely. I have my own... I wouldn't call it a harness as such, but rather a shared Kanban board, and it'll be the subject of a "Show HN" soon. It suffices to say that I define Kanban cards for each feature or bug, and I have clearly defined review points for each card, post-spec and post-code, where I step in. On top of that, after my review, there is an agentic review, and agents can and do catch things that I missed. The quality of the software has improved quite a bit since I instituted that flow.
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> Junior engineer learn, AI does not.

This is technically true, but lets not act like we haven't seen immense improvement of both models are harnesses for these models in the past years. They may not be learning, but they are getting better

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They are getting better at historical data, not at the fundamental issue.

As a recent example, I recently had to abandon the multiple LLM reviewer/verifier model I was using because zig 0.16 was released with major changes.

I actually reverted back to full self hosted because the foundation models we’re trying too hard to revert to the older versions of the language.

It is going to be a balancing act and there is fundamentally no way for LLMs to get around this.

We will have to develop methods to do so, most likely by focusing agents on problems that are more static.

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I find great success in not relying on LLM's built-in knowledge, but giving it links to necessary docs/manuals and have it read that before doing anything.
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Also, add "no assumptions or guesses" and if you use a model with really strong prompt adherence (most SOTA models), they'll figure out the right version first, then look up docs, then implement.
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Unless you log its mistakes and how they were solved in decisions.log
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You might want to think about how that technique scales as your decisions.log accumulates more and more guidance.

Or at least maybe ask Claude what will happen when the md and log files that keep it on task start to dominate and someday even overflow its context windows.

Using AI doesn't protect you from thinking about resource constraints and algorithm tradeoffs like any other engineer might. It's just that the resource constraints and algorithms tradeoffs that you need to engineer around become those of the AI tooling rather than the project its generating.

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