I believe agentic coding could eventually be a paradigm shift, if and only if the agents become self-conscious of design decisions and their implications on the system and its surrounding systems as a whole.

If that doesn’t happen, the entire workflow devolves into specifying system states and behavior in natural language, which is something humans are exceedingly bad at.

Coincidently, that is why we have invented programming languages: to be able to express program state and behavior unambiguously.

I’m not bullish on a future where I have to write specifications on all explicit and implicit corner and edge cases just to have an agent make software design choices which don’t feel batshit insane to humans.

We already have software corporations which produce that kind of code simply because the people doing the specifying don’t know the system or the domain it operates in, and the people doing the implementing of those specifications don’t necessarily know any of that either.

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