Posted by pavel_lishin 6 hours ago
> “It will be like kubernetes, but for agents,” I said.
> “It will have to have multiple levels of agents supervising other agents,” I said.
> “It will have a Merge Queue,” I said.
> “It will orchestrate workflows,” I said.
> “It will have plugins and quality gates,” I said.
More “agile for agents” than “Kubernetes for agents”.
While the agents can generate, they can't exercise that judgement, they can't see nuances and they can't really walk their actions back in a "that's not quite what I meant" sense.
Exercising judgement is where design actually happens, it is iterative, in response to something concrete. The bottleneck isn't just thinking ahead, it's the judgment call when you see the result, its the walking back, as well as thinking forward.
Anyways we'll likely always settle on simpler/boring - but the game analogies are fun in the time being. A lot of opportunity to enhance UX around design, planning, and review.
Hah, tell that to Docker, or React (the ecosystem, not the library), or any of the other terrible technologies that have better thought-out alternatives, but we're stuck with them being the de facto standard because they were first.
It's the same chasm that all the AI vendors are exploiting: the gap between people who have some idea what is going on and the vast mass of people who don't but are addicted to excitement or fear of the future.
Yegge is being fake-playful about it but if you have read any of his other writing, this tracks. None of it is to be taken very seriously because he values provocation and mischief a little too highly, but bits of it have some ideas worth thinking about.
In claude I have a code-reviewer agent, and I remind cc often to run the code reviewer before closing any bead. It works surprisingly well.
I used to monitor context and start afresh when it reached ~80%, but I stopped doing that. Compacting is not as disruptive as it used to be, and with beads agents don't lose track.
I spent some time trying to measure the productivity change due to beads, analysing cc and codex logs and linking them to deltas and commits in git [1]. But I did not fully believe the result (5x increase when using beads, there has to be some hidden variable) and I moved on to other things.
Part of the complexity is that these days I often work on two or three projects at the same time, so attribution is difficult.
[1] Analysis code is at https://github.com/juanre/agent-taylor
I haven't seen anything to suggest that Yegge is proposing it as a serious tool for serious work, so why all the hate?
Debt doesnt come due immediately, its accrued and may allow for the purchase of things that were once too expensive, but eventually the bill comes due.
Ive started referring to vibe-coding as "Credit Cards" for developers. Allowing them to accrue massive amounts of technical debt that were previously out of reach. This can provide some competent developers with incredible improvments to their work. But for the people who accrue more Technical Debt than they have the ability to pay off, it can sink their project and cost our organization alot in lost investment of both time and money.
I see Gas Town and tools like as debt schemes where someone applies for more credit cards to pay the payments on prior cards they've maxed out, compounding the issue with the vague goal of "eventually it pays off." So color me skeptical.
Not sure if this analogy holds up to all things, but its been helping my organization navigate the application of agents, since it allows us to allocate spend depending on the seniority of each developer. Thus ive been feeling like an underwriter having to figure out if a developer requesting more credits or budget for agentic code can be trusted to pay off the debt they will accrue.