Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents like a medical team

I can think of nothing I'd like to use less than a database or filesystem vibecoded by Gas Town-flavored psychosis. Roleplaying with LLMs is not the secret to producing amazing code.

This feels to me like a lovely example of both high-quality systems design and information theory. From my perspective, one of the more abstractly interesting thoughts surfaced by this write-up is the degree to which you've "encoded" a highly complex set of relationships through use of metaphor.

That type of encoding (starting with the statement: you're at a teaching hospital) is profoundly more efficient than having to deeply and reliably articulate what each of the various roles your agents embody are, let alone their interactions.

Perhaps there is more room for any of us to consider what existing systems or identities are described abundantly in training sets and can be leveraged to ritualistically encode these social/civic/cultural dynamics saying: "act as though you're ___." Not exactly a new point, but one this write-up certainly is pulling me towards.

Thank you for sharing and the care you put into writing this!

I absolutely love how you are able to pull so much latent behavior from the underlying LLM. I wonder what other analogies can be pulled into agentic coding that come baked into the existing weights.

A hint at why GitHub actions have been unreliable. How many teams are running factories like this on GH infra now?

Since we are all building our version of this, what mistakes did you made until you arrived to a well-balanced solution? I really like that you know how much an issue is, because then you can start optimizing.

Rafi and I, who authored this post, will be hanging out here for any questions people may have.

One role I didn't see was patient advocate/representative? That might be another approach to non-convergence - "how is this going?" and escalation.

Maybe I missed it, but I didn't really see anything about the long term quality or maintainability of the code. All I see is agent agent agent.

Great post!

One thing I've been experimenting with in my own agent orchestration system is an agent that hangs around and does post-merge acceptance testing after the work ships. Any plans to add a follow-up phase? Travel nurse?

Nice writeup. Structured handoffs and external plan reviews are good takeaways.

You give a very precise measure of redundancy in the skills. Can you give a bit more detail in how you decided you needed to audit them and how you went about it? Was it fully agent driven? Mostly human?

Reminds me of the “surgical team” development model in the Mythical Man Month.

The patient “leaves” when the bug is fixed?

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