alt Hacker NewsHe is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar to his. But in areas where they don’t exist, writing code isn’t a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents.
Even with full context, writing CSS in a project where vanilla CSS is scattered around and wasn’t well thought out originally is challenging. Coding agents struggle there too, just not as much as humans, even with feedback loops through browser automation.
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Truth. I've had much easier time grappling with code bases I keep clean and compartmentalized with AI, over-stuffing context is one of the main killers of its quality.
Having picked up a few long neglected projects in the past year, AI has been tremendous in rapidly shipping quality of dev life stuff like much improved test suites, documenting the existing behavior, handling upgrades to newer framework versions, etc.
I've really found it's a flywheel once you get going.
All those people who thought clean well architected code wasn’t important…now with LLMs modifying code it’s even more important.
It's funny that "restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents" aligns really well with what we have "supposed" to have been doing already, but many teams slack on: quality tests that are easy to run, and great documentation. Context and verifiability.
The easier your codebase is to hack on for a human, the easier it is for an LLM generally.