What’s one thing you can do to help yourself, other engineers, and even agents better understand a codebase? Add comments to your code. Such a basic practice that comes up on nearly _every_ pull request I review.
Claude's performative "this request was sooo dangerous that we downgraded to Opus" is wearing me down I ask it straightfoward questions, nothing shady, nothing complicated, and it tells me it's too dangerous for Fable. What BS.
Claude's performative "this request was sooo dangerous that we downgraded to Opus" is wearing me down I ask it straightfoward questions, nothing shady, nothing complicated, and it tells me it's too dangerous for Fable. What BS.
But it actually means that if you take the median programmer and their pull requests towards an average open source project, they're already getting outclassed by agents. I would rather get an agent-written pull request to one of my projects than I'd get one written by a human, and it's not just because the quality's better. It's also because I feel a lot less bad if I just reject it.
And the plan doc, what was bad about it is it didn't give you leverage. The plan was every single line of code that was going to change like in diff blocks and like all the new stuff to write. And so like people would review these plans. We recommended this. We told people to read the plans. We read all our plans. And then eventually I found myself like I just kind of skimmed the plans.
you can slow way down and read every PR and read every line of code. Uh, and then you're only going to really get modest benefits from AI because that becomes I I think you should expect maybe 30 to 50% lift in productivity is kind of what I see when we go into teams
So I think the the thing I'm most excited is actually like what we call like iterated loops or like slow loops where we basically have a cron job. We have the loop the the the structure of the loop is really easy. It's like run this llinter fix one thing commit and push and then we run that every night in our GitHub actions and we wake up every morning to one PR that makes the codebase a little bit better.
Since I mostly work on Laravel projects or packages, I usually enable the Laravel Idea plugin. It's a paid plugin, but it's definitely worth the money since it can provide stuff like auto-completions for route names, request fields and more.
And what you see when we work with them internally is now they're just like they're just making pull pull requests. Like they don't they don't need to hand it off as much. Sometimes they do but like a lot of times they just make pull requests and it's like the thing is built and that's it and I think that's incredible for the way that companies work
Even for back end, it can be a problem because if you have a request incoming right when it checks all of your objects like you have some sort of latency spike where you it takes much longer to to reply. So that's one of the reasons it can be helpful in in back end as well.
As we move from, you know, hey, [clears throat] these companies are selling tokens where they provide the entire uh reasoning chain and all that to uh selling automated, you know, white collar work, right? Automated software engineer, send them the request, they give you the result back and there's a bunch of thinking on the back end that they don't show you. The ability to distill out of American models into Chinese models will be harder.
But I don't want to, like, pull that down because every time someone made the first pull request is a win for our society, you know? Like, it… Like, it doesn't matter how, how shitty it is, y- you gotta start somewhere.
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