Hard perhaps but it feels a lot easier now than three years ago. Or so my backlog of personal projects outside of my most familiar stack would suggest.
Optimising to keep the coding going 24/7 feels like a local optimisation trap. The amount of code that can be written by coding agents in normal working hours dwarfs what humans can productively describe and assess.
My efforts will be in improving agentic requirements gathering and assessment.
Absolutely, spin up a TCP server in Ruby, make it run `eval` on what it receives and tell the agent how to call it with netcat or whatever, works like a charm :)
The claim is astonishing, given emacs’ continuous use and open source scrutiny for decades. Edit: and turns out to be a problem with git, not emacs.
OTOH it’s really just the core that has been used so widely and so continuously for so long. This integration with git will have been scrutinized far less.
As an emacs user I frequently find myself in territory where I’m seemingly the only person in the world with my use case. In fact that’s half of the value: I can make emacs do whatever I want. Which means there’s security consistent with a bus factor of 1.
Those kinds of bugs exist because no-one is accountable for quality like in other industries, unless it is on high integrity computing, or the cyber security laws that are finally coming into place across several countries.
Experience doesn’t leave me with any confidence that the long term memory will be useful for long. Our agentic code bases are a few months old, wait a few years for those comments to get out of date and then see how much it helps.
The great thing about agentic coding is you can define one whose entire role is to read a diff, look in contextual files for comments, and verify whether they’re still accurate.
You don’t have to rely on humans doing it. The agent’s entire existence is built around doing this one mundane task that is annoying but super useful.
Yes, lets blow another 5-10k a project/month on tokens to keep the comments up to date. The fact ai still cannot consistently refactor without leaving dead code around even after a self review does not give me confidence in comments…
Comments in code are often a code smell. This is an industry standard for a reason and isnt because of staleness. If u are writing a comment, it means the code is bad or there is irreducible complexity. It is about good design. Comments everywhere are almost always a flag.
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