Should we be talking about LLMs' taste and proclivities? Because these can also be prompted. You can put your Claude or Codex in the mind of someone who remembers Larry Wall and his three virtues, and it will do a fantastic job at uncovering the lacking abstractions and poor quality _in someone else's code_.
The jury is still out in my mind. Can I use these tools to create software that does not suck? Will the speed at which code can be created and modified lead to a change in our ideas of what good code looks like?
Last week I had a good idea for a change in architecture in my software that will make it much more powerful. I set a team of 12 agents on it, mostly unsupervised, with a pretty weak org structure. After a day and a half, and way too many tokens spent, they managed to build the entirely wrong thing. All tests passed.
The next few days have been spent with a much simpler structure: two teams, each of two agents, one coding (Codex is better at it these days) and one reviewing and keeping things aligned with the docs (Claude). This may have worked, I am still not sure.
My best guess right now of how good software development will look like with these tools: the effort/tokens spent on reviewing needs to be commensurate with the effort spent on coding.
The jury is still out in my mind. Can I use these tools to create software that does not suck? Will the speed at which code can be created and modified lead to a change in our ideas of what good code looks like?
Last week I had a good idea for a change in architecture in my software that will make it much more powerful. I set a team of 12 agents on it, mostly unsupervised, with a pretty weak org structure. After a day and a half, and way too many tokens spent, they managed to build the entirely wrong thing. All tests passed.
The next few days have been spent with a much simpler structure: two teams, each of two agents, one coding (Codex is better at it these days) and one reviewing and keeping things aligned with the docs (Claude). This may have worked, I am still not sure.
My best guess right now of how good software development will look like with these tools: the effort/tokens spent on reviewing needs to be commensurate with the effort spent on coding.