[moosehater]

Do you feel like you are still learning about the programming language(s) and other technologies you are using? Or do you feel like you are already a master at them?

Do you ever take the time to validate what one of the agents produces by going to the docs? Or is all debugging/changing of the code done via LLMs/agents?

I'm more like level 2 right now and genuinely curious if you feel like learning continues for you (besides with agentic orchestration, etc.) And if not, whether or not you think that matters.

[jjmarr]

I'm learning more than ever before. I'm not a master at anything but I am getting basic proficiency in virtually everything.

> Do you ever take the time to validate what one of the agents produces by going to the docs? Or is all debugging/changing of the code done via LLMs/agents?

I divide my work into vibecoding PoC and review. Only once I have something working do I review the code. And I do so through intense interrogation while referencing the docs.

> I'm more like level 2 right now and genuinely curious if you feel like learning continues for you (besides with agentic orchestration, etc.)

Level 8 only works in production for a defined process where you don't need oversight and the final output is easy to trust.

For example, I made a code review tool that chunks a PR and assigns rule/violation combos to agents. This got a 20% time to merge reduction and catches 10x the issues as any other agent because it can pull context. And the output is easy to incorporate since I have a manager agent summarize everything.

Likewise, I'm working on an automatic performance tool right now that chunks code, assigns agents to make microbenchmarks, and tries to find optimization points. The end result should be easy to verify since the final suggestion would be "replace this data structure with another, here's a microbenchmark proving so".

[moosehater]

Got it. This all makes sense to me. Very targeted tooling that is specific to your company's CI platform as opposed to a dark factory where you're creating a bunch of new code no one reads. And it sounds like these level 8 agents are given specific permission for everything they're allowed to do ahead of time. That seems sound from an engineering perspective.

Also would be interested in an example of "validation layers that trim hallucinations with handwritten linters" but understand if that's not something you can share. Either way, thanks for responding!

[jjmarr]

> Also would be interested in an example of "validation layers that trim hallucinations with handwritten linters"

For code review, AI doesn't want to output well-formed JSON and oftentimes doesn't leave inline suggestions cleanly. So there's a step where the AI must call a script that validates the JSON and checks if applying the suggestion results in valid code, then fixes the code review comments until they do.