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rodphilyesterday at 1:49 AM1 replyview on HN

> At the most basic level this means making sure they can run commands to execute the code - easiest with languages like Python, with HTML+JavaScript you need to remind them that Playwright exists and they should use it.

So I've been exploring the idea of going all-in on this "basic level" of validation. I'm assembling systems out of really small "services" (written in Go) that Claude Code can immediately run and interact with using curl, jq, etc. Plus when building a particular service I already have all of the downstream services (the dependencies) built and running so a lot of dependency management and integration challenges disappear. Only trying this out at a small scale as yet, but it's fascinating how the LLMs can potentially invert a lot of the economics that inform the current conventional wisdom.

(Shameless plug: I write about this here: https://twilightworld.ai/thoughts/atomic-programming/)

My intuition is that LLMs will for many use cases lead us away from things like formal verification and even comprehensive test suites. The cost of those activities is justified by the larger cost of fixing things in production; I suspect that we will eventually start using LLMs to drive down the cost of production fixes, to the point where a lot of those upstream investments stop making sense.


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jcranmeryesterday at 2:13 AM

> My intuition is that LLMs will for many use cases lead us away from things like formal verification and even comprehensive test suites. The cost of those activities is justified by the larger cost of fixing things in production; I suspect that we will eventually start using LLMs to drive down the cost of production fixes, to the point where a lot of those upstream investments stop making sense.

There is still a cost to having bugs, even if deploying fixes becomes much cheaper. Especially if your plan is to wait until they actually occur in practice to discover that you have a bug in the first place.

Put differently: would you want the app responsible for your payroll to be developed in this manner? Especially considering that the bug in question would be "oops, you didn't get paid."