Agentic coding harnesses are violating the unix philosophy and trying to become the everything app for coding (and work and personal assistant and so on).
Why not build everything?
Many of the articles I’m reading are saying what we’ve been saying all along, “writing the code hasn’t been the bottleneck.” No project was late because engineers didn’t spend enough time sitting at their desks typing code. And now that writing the code is approaching zero, I think it’s more important than ever to carefully, methodically consider every project and initiative.
“This feature is not a good fit for coding agents so we aren’t going to put it into our harness.”
- No AI company ever
Non-engineering folks have long enjoyed the luxury of engineering being the bottleneck (not writing code, but review, deploy, integration, etc.) and have been able to change requirements, goals and targets while we were working. When we can take a set of requirements and later that afternoon be dev complete… Just think about what would have happened if we’d implemented verbatim some of those first draft project proposals?
I’m working on a personal project to upgrade my personal daily task list from a plain markdown file to use Remember The Milk (the only task tracking app which gets recurring items right, but I digress). I have a pretty decent idea of what I want. I’ve been working in this flow for over 8 years after all. I’m, of course, having an agent write all the code. But I’m going slow. I’m carefully considering each feature and more precisely how it should work than I ever have ahead of time before. I feel this great responsibility to move intentionally because I have this great power to push a button, fold 5 pieces of clothes, turn back to my laptop and have a working feature.
To me, LLMs and agents and all of it, from the start, has never been about getting faster. It’s about reducing the “manual” effort of willing a (software) thing into existence. As I’ve been gaining experience with agents et al, I keep coming back time and time again to the best practices of the industry: “have a really good and detailed scope doc,” “compare that to the code and form a focused implementation plan,” “break that down into units of work that depend on each other or can be done in parallel.” We always wanted that but it was too time consuming to do and we relied on each other’s existing context. Many tickets don’t have any body description. We just talked about the project scope in the kick off, but didn’t formalize a document. Ironically, the machine is forcing (and enabling) us to do the things that would have been best all along, even for humans.
Do one thing well
Time and again the best software is focused and does one thing really well. That’s the unix philosophy. Composability over batteries included. Make a simple and powerful tool to let those using it combine it with other simple and powerful tools to make something greater than the sum of the tools themselves.
These new releases in the agent harnesses are hard to reason about because many of the new features feel half-baked and not rooted in solving a real problem. I end up feeling obligated to find use for them. It’s FOMO a bit. “Well, if they implemented it and released it, it must be something good. I must be missing something if I can’t find the use case.”
It’s hard to face this down. The company worth tens of billions of dollars is churning out features on the most talked about software of the moment and my gut is telling me to ignore most of it. I got bored and frustrated really quickly babysitting the agent. “Yes” “Approve” over and over. Same prompt. Same slash command. Same skill. Tweak it a bit here and there. Now, I’m automating it and running into some longing for more focus on a simple tool that I can work with not indefinitely inside of.
Do less
I don’t want to leave on a down note so let’s talk solutions. Do less. Make more. Let’s build an ecosystem around this tool. Let’s solve the rest of the SDLC competently. LLMs are a versatile technology and are made even more powerful with agent harnesses. They aren’t a silver bullet either. I love that we’re pushing the envelope of what can these things do. I love that we don’t know yet. It’s exciting to be a part of.
The more I work with agents the more I see how important the “old” best practices are. The more pre-planning matters. The more detailed specs matter. The more nailing down inter-service interacations matter. Start at the boundaries and work inward on both sides. Hand offs. Metrics. Automated end-to-end testing. There’s nothing new here. It’s just compressed and accelerated; and can be exhausting at times. In this age where we can build anything, the taste and discipline to not build something matters. I’d love to see that in the tools themselves.
Happy shipping!
– Chris
