[senko]

> This isn’t a coincidence. It’s the same SDLC every functioning engineering organisation runs, just in different vocabulary. [...] Amazon calls it the working-backwards memo and the bar raiser. Every healthy team has some version of this loop.

This (sdlc == working backwards & bar raiser) is so horribly wrong, that I hope this was an LLM hallucination.

In general, I'm starting to see these agent scaffolding systems as an anti-pattern: people obsess over systems for guiding agents and construct elaborate rube-goldberg machines and then others cargo-cult them wholesale, in an effort to optimize and control a random process and minimize human involvement.

[PleasureBot]

All of these articles about setting up the perfect agent environments with skills, plugins, MCP servers, markdown files, etc. etc. reminds me so much of the culture around setting up the perfect "productivity stack". You need the perfect note-tacking app, ticketing app, calendar integrations, yada yada before you can really do anything meaningful. The reality is that you're going to get beat by someone with a few things written down on a piece of paper who is just getting stuff done.

[yks]

The problem is it’s so rarely A/B tested, definitely not at scale. An engineer, who writes all these my-workflow-but-for-agents skills, proceeds to get the good outcome, while also seeing affirmations that the agent did follow the prescribed processes - that is considered a victory. In reality the outcome could’ve been just as good if they fed Claude a spec + acceptance criteria, or even a basic prompt for the simpler tasks.

[AndyNemmity]

Yeah, I Blind A/B test everything, and a lot.

But I don't expect anyone to every use my stuff. It's complicated as hell. But it's for me, and it works without me having to remotely think about the complexity.

I love that.

[BOOSTERHIDROGEN]

This is how similarly we collectively approach Taylorism, isn't it? However, the world favors capitalism, of which Taylorism becomes a handy scaffolding.