| This is a fascinating thought. I agree. It is one thing to let it write a prompt. Prompting, Generating, Judging and going till it is satiated is gluttony. Every week I ship 4-5 sprints' worth of work that improves features, simplifies code, adds maintainability while delivering value to my end users without feeling I butchered a software hand-engineered over 10 years. This is one product. Mentioning it as an example because it got built over the years starting 2010. It has ~7000 paying customers and works in the B2B space. The B2B SaaS space is brutal since the defendable value should be delivered with margins two levels deep. I wouldn't be able to do it w/o coding agents. BUT I will never do it with LOOP ENGINEERING. Not in 2026 and not in 2036. Software Engineering as such is not going to be much different in 2036 than it is now. What stops me is the accountability that lies with me in delivered software. Setting lofty goals, a few guardrails and then letting harness and agent rip it overnight can (and have) created slop. I did not find LLMs systematically generate poor code. What is poor? Poor in traditional handcraft coding days is defined by - Poor performance
- Verbosity
- Complexity
- Hardcoding
- Poor maintainability These are guardrails that the models understand. However it cannot understand all these upfront - when building new. It always needs a retrospection cycle and a token budget to refactor. This is tech debt which we all carried and solved. It is just at an exponential scale because - well, the generation is happening at a super human scale. So, either build the harness with the tech debt coverage cycles or take on ourselves to add that cycle triggered by human judgement. A few things that are working for me and I trust are: Forge CLI - the harness I use with a built-in engineering philosophy for everyday work [https://github.com/Entelligentsia/forge-cli] A few patterns that I have known to trust for building software that can be maintained - expressed as skills [https://github.com/Entelligentsia/skillforge/tree/main/desig...] A few patterns for the new probabilistic constructs we build with in 2026
LLM Patterns [https://github.com/Entelligentsia/skillforge/tree/main/desig...]
Harness Patterns [https://github.com/Entelligentsia/skillforge/tree/main/harne...] The harness gives me a process. Patterns give me architectural guardrails as I could enforce (with a prayer). But still read code. We gotta. |