My view is at the end of 35 years in the industry the current wave of “software” and “systems” engineering coming out of the AI harness community is pretty garbage. But web technology and distributed systems followed a very similar arc, as did protocols and memory management; and microcode before them. But it feels like this is particularly bad because the mistakes being made are plainly obvious to the grey heads who have been here a while. As opposed to before when mistakes were in new domains being explored, these are mistakes made before and have good solutions to.

I feel people too readily blame the LLMs themselves for this, but I’ve found LLMs know the history of computing thought evolution better than anyone I’ve ever encountered. Once you push them in the right direction, ground them in the philosophy of thought of hard won engineering ideas, they are astoundingly precise and accurate in their read and application (keeping every session grounded is the trick!). So it’s not the machines making these same mistakes with ready conceptual frameworks around them, it’s the 22 year old gatekeepers dashing head first into wall after wall, when we painstakingly built the door two feet to the left about the time they were gestating.

Anthropic in 2025: We can use our dominant market position to degrade the harness experiences of our competitors because they will never adopt CLAUDE.md

Anthropic in 2026: We are losing our market position. Users who adopted other harnesses have a degraded Claude Code experience because it doesn't recognize their AGENTS.md

Its like the Epic Games Store supporting Linux, or [any website] supporting dark mode. You'd think its an easy to implement bare minimum that everyone asks for, but its like pulling teeth to actually get it done.