Posted by mellosouls 6 hours ago
I’m happy to answer any questions!
> Those of us building software factories must practice a deliberate naivete
This is a great way to put it, I've been saying "I wonder which sacred cows are going to need slaughtered" but for those that didn't grow up on a farm, maybe that metaphor isn't the best. I might steal yours.
This stuff is very interesting and I'm really interested to see how it goes for you, I'll eagerly read whatever you end up putting out about this. Good luck!
EDIT: oh also the re-implemented SaaS apps really recontextualizes some other stuff I’ve been doing too…
Or a vegan or Hindu. Which ethics are you willing to throw away to run the software factory?
I eat hamburgers while aware of the moral issues.
To name one probable area of involvement: how do you specify what needs to be built?
Your intuition/thinking definitely lines up with how we're thinking about this problem. If you have a good definition of done and a good validation harness, these agents can hill climb their way to a solution.
But you still need human taste/judgment to decide what you want to build (unless your solution is to just brute force the entire problem space).
For maximal leverage, you should follow the mantra "Why am I doing this?" If you use this enough times, you'll come across the bottleneck that can only be solved by you for now. As a human, your job is to set the higher-level requirements for what you're trying to build. Coming up with these requirements and then using agents to shape them up is acceptable, but human judgment is definitely where we have to answer what needs to be built. At the same time, I never want to be doing something the models are better at. Until we crack the proactiveness part, we'll be required to figure out what to do next.
Also, it looks like you and Danvers are working in the same space, and we love trading notes with other teams working in this area. We'd love to connect. You can either find my personal email or shoot me an email at my work email: navan.chauhan [at] strongdm.com
Not just code review agents, but things like "find duplicated code and refactor it"?
* DRYing/Refactoring if needed
* Documentation compaction
* Security reviews
Funnily enough, the marketing department even ran a campaign asking, “What does DM stand for?!”, and the answer was “Digital Metropolis,” because we did a design refresh.
I just linked the website because that’s what the actual company does, and we are just the “AI Lab”
THIS FRIGHTENS ME. Many of us sweng are either going be FIRE millionaires, or living under a bridge, in two years.
I’ve spent this week performing SemPort; found a ts app that does a needed thing, and was able to use a long chain of prompts to get it completely reimplemented in our stack, using Gene Transfer to ensure it uses some existing libraries and concrete techniques present in our existing apps.
Now not only do I have an idiomatic Python port, which I can drop right into our stack, but I have an extremely detailed features/requirements statement for the origin typescript app along with the prompts for generating it. I can use this to continuously track this other product as it improves. I also have the “instructions infrastructure” to direct an agent to align new code to our stack. Two reusable skills, a new product, and it took a week.
Is it really that hard to write “developer” or “engineer”?
I was just trying to share the same patterns from OPs documentation that I found valuable within the context of agentic development; seeing them take this so far is was scares me, because they are right that I could wire an agent to do this autonomously and probably get the same outcomes, scaled.