#software-quality
Wiki 20
- Agentic Coding is a Trap Lars Faye on the supervision paradox — agent oversight requires the very skills that agent use erodes, plus vendor lock-in and token cost volatility
- Agentic Coding is Burning Me Out 0xsid on decision fatigue as the next invisible friction — gacha-loop psychology, broken pacing, and the verifier-of-the-verifier regress
- AI Agents and the Refactoring That Never Happens Getting lost in tangled code used to be what made engineers stop and refactor; agents don't get lost, so the checkpoint has to be put back on purpose
- AI-Written Code Is Still Your Code Writing code used to force understanding it; with agents writing, understanding becomes a separate cost, and shipping the code still means owning it
- Benchmarking Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench Dex Horthy runs three Claude models through SlopCodeBench; the best, Opus 5, clears 24% strict pass
- Clean Code in the Age of Coding Agents Code structure matters more with agents — context windows are finite, messy code wastes tokens
- Control the Ideas, Not the Code antirez argues line-by-line review of LLM code is mostly wasted effort — own the design, spend the hours on QA and direction
- Eight Years of Wanting, Three Months of Building with AI Vibe coding failure, disciplined rewrite, the addiction loop, and why design can't be delegated
- Error-stack discard anti-pattern Suppressing one inconvenient error by clearing a library's entire shared error channel, silently discarding unrelated errors that belong to other code
- In Defense of Not Understanding Your Codebase Goedecke's case that partial understanding is the honest baseline in large systems, and one engineering value traded against others
- Notes on Software Quality (Hobday) Hobday defines quality as absence of problems, six software signals, and argues quality can't survive scale
- Skill atrophy and the supervision paradox The circularity where agent oversight requires the critical-thinking and code-reading skills that heavy agent use measurably erodes
- Slow Software: The Case for High-latency Systems Development Irene Zhang argues critical infrastructure needs deliberate development friction now that AI decoupled importance from build time
- Testing-heavy, no-review workflow Ship large volumes of unreviewed (including agent-generated) code by trusting randomized testing over human code review — the CPU-verification model applied to software
- The Cult of Vibe Coding Is Insane Bram Cohen on why refusing to read AI-generated code is dogfooding gone cult, with his audit-discuss-execute workflow
- The pandemic of incomplete OpenSSL error handling Julian Andres Klode on the widespread anti-pattern of calling ERR_clear_error() to make OpenSSL errors go away — discarding unrelated errors off the error stack
- The Peril of Laziness Lost Cantrill on why LLMs lack laziness — human time constraints drive simplicity, unchecked generation bloats
- The Short Leash AI Coding Method Read every diff in the permission prompt and deny freely — Slepak's method for critical software
- Vibe Coding and Agentic Engineering Are Getting Closer Than I'd Like Willison admits the line between vibe coding and agentic engineering has collapsed in his own practice — he no longer reviews every line, even for production
- Why Software Factories Fail Dex Horthy on why lights-off factories fail — RL rewards passing tests, never good design
Toolbox 1
- QUALITY.md Root-file format declaring what quality means in a project, with a CLI that evaluates against it
talks 1
- Don't Take the Black Pill Kelley argues software quality tracked programmer bargaining power, and that despair about it is the actual trap