[cookiengineer]

An LLM agent will only be as good as the environment it operates in.

If you build your environment to be specification based, you have to make sure you have good specifications. If your "memory solution" uses freeform markdown notes, you already lost from the start.

Also choose languages with good unit testing built-in, and languages with unified code styles, and unified toolchains. If you use C++, assume that there's a million ways to build your algorithm. If you use JS, assume 10 different build pipelines. If you use java, assume bloat by dependency hell.

LLMs mimic the ecosystem's variety and variadicity(?). Languages like Go shine so well because it's a very opinionated language, where there's only one proposed way on how to implement things. And that's a good harness to begin with. LLMs are like children on the playground. You have to build better rulesets and fences to make them behave how you expect them to.

Also, check out qwen3.6 coder and heretic models. 30b is the sweet spot for coding and unit testing. For planning and designing, gemma4 is pretty good.