The Tower Keeps Rising

I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear.

I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating.

Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfortunately I've found that the architectural instincts, even of Fable and 5.6 Sol, are still wildly behind what I reflexively achieve, say.

For sure there is an ability to have agents go back over work and try to fold it into better and better abstractions until it's sort of annealed into something good. I've done something similar on codebases that I have, but the 'high reaches' of architecture with great _prediction of how the software will evolve in the future_ in _subtle_ ways – those are, for now, out of reach of agents.

There is a part of me that wonders if it's partly just how much they can hold in their head right now, though. Even with the greatest articulation and high density of feeding them, the current setups don't allow them to hold a high-quality, sparse, 'zoomable' model of the world in their head that well yet, which we can do pretty well.

But the fact that I'm talking about it in terms of that kind of subtlety is itself promising, I guess?

> There is the appealing idea that AI-assisted programming means better tools which lets us build more ambitious software. That is certainly true at the level of the individual and without doubt a developer with an agent will be dramatically more capable of changing a codebase. But large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people can coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing.

So true.

Since Nov 30, 2022 everything has become… more complex.

Agents are very good at making us think the tower is rising, when in fact it is falling beneath our feet.

I come back to Babel and the Bruegel image too, although taking from it a little less optimism.

I feel these systems rising and sprawling with wee myopic agents developing out their little corners of this unknowably vast whole… a tower with 50 parapets on one side and some wacky cantilevered maiden tower on the other, and a very serviceable adobe roof over some patio for god-knows-why, and thatch over the landing next to it…

Some grotesque fatberg of designs that make sense at the level of individual design efforts, but that lack the fractal sort of levels of policy and judgment that unify the overall enterprise.

The overall language, as it were.

And language takes discipline to establish and maintain through any sufficiently large group of people—witness the company-speak or army-speak of pretty much any successful organization.

We feel like we’ve conquered the problem of talking the same language as our “Gastown Mayors” (who in turn are talking the same language as their “polecats” and so on all the way down the chain of golems)… but it’s only when it’s all built that the good Lord will humble us… that we’ll realize the understanding we thought we’d transmitted perfectly from our thrones wasn’t quite so shared as we’d imagined.

ai eliminating friction is eliminating learning and understanding. this is felt with more severe consequences in K-12 writing and music.

The core thesis of this essay is reminiscent of the Lisp Curse [1] / Bipolar Lisp Programmer [2].

It's been a few years since I read these, but if I recall the argument there, it was that Lisp makes it so easy to build stuff and scratch exactly your own itch, that there's no real strong push for lisp programmers to come together and collaborate to build non-trivial and general purpose artifacts. And that is why the landscape of public lisp software is poorer as a result, compared to languages which demand much more effort to get anything substantial done.

Armin seems to be making a very similar point about AI coding.

[1] https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

[2] https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html

My comment is not directly responding to the essay, but it got me thinking about about how agentic programming is much more akin to management than it is to actual programming. Managers generally only have a high level idea of what ICs are working on and often don't have the time, bandwidth, and in some cases ability to understand everything the ICs they're supervising are doing. As more and more software gets written agentically the role of software engineer becomes less technical and more managerial.

> The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does. This language is rarely written down in one place. It lives partly in documentation and code, but also in code review, conversations, arguments, and the experience of having to explain a change to somebody else.

This is so true. I am a big fan of Christopher Alexander’s “Pattern Language” concept, which addresses this exact problem! In fact he recommends developing your own pattern languages for your own domains (which of course led to the famous GoF Design Patterns book).

I have been experimenting with a “Pattern Language” skill which instructs the AI to maintain 3 pattern languages for every project. One in the business domain, one in the product domain, and one in the technical domain. It is working really well. It is always super cool to see it reference the pattern languages during planning and curate them during implementation and review.

I credit using it with keeping my 100% ai-coded projects well organized, aligned across domains, and easy to work on.

It used to be that you need a good reason to make huge refactorings, because it’s often so much work. Now agent can rewrite half of your code if your prompt is vague enough and you don’t actual try to review it all. And so the “soul” of a program can change dramatically every single day. It’s both great and very much not so.

The agent will always fill in the gaps in your understanding. It's not a compiler. It's categorically different from any of the other ways we've built software.

I'm not sure reading code is coming back. The ritual of reading code must come back, because that's the only way to build products that don't collapse under their own incoherence, both technically and visibly.

"just ask Claude" is fine, but it's not the end state

No, the story of the tower of Babel was:

"we can, so we should".

It ended badly.

Does it really keep rising? Many of my fondest memories of technology come from times past...

... and narrowing.

Where the "tower" was once a company (or team?) of human devs, it can now be a single dev and their agents.

The right engineer can likely replace non-technical co-founders with a couple LLMs. Geez, I can't wait to write that article...

You use a shared agents.md and an auto updated architecture doc but that is the one that needs to be heavily scrutinized and everyone gets a turn to review it.