Not that humans can't write 100k line programs bug free or without running parts of it.

An AI cannot write a 100k line program on its own without external guard rails otherwise it spins out. This has nothing to do with whether the agent is allowed to run the code itself. This is well documented. Look at what was required to allow Claude to write a "C compiler".

This has nothing to do with whether it's bug free. It literally can't produce a working 100k LOC program without external guardrails.

Absolutely no one is arguing that you shouldn’t have a combination of manual and automated tests around either AI or human generated code or that you shouldn’t have a thoughtful design

In a non-trivial app you can't test your way through all of the e2e workflows and thoughtful design isn't what I'm talking about.

How many bugs have you seen that passed your automated and manual testing? Probably 99.9% of them.

Now imagine that you take those same test suites and you unleash an agent on the code that has far worse reasoning capabilities than a human and you tell them they can change anything in the code as long as the tests pass.

So if bugs pass through testing which they have forever, wouldn’t that imply that humans are just as fallible as AI - and slower?

I never suggested letting agents code for a day on end. I use AI to code well defined tasks and treat it like a mid level ticket taker

If you have an employee who codes 2x faster than everyone else but produces 10x the bugs, would your suggestion to be to let him rip and stop reviewing his code output?

> I never suggested letting agents code for a day on end. I use AI to code well defined tasks and treat it like a mid level ticket taker

It doesn’t matter how long you’re letting it run. If you aren’t reviewing the output, you have no way of knowing when it changes untested behavior.

I regularly find Claude doing insane things that I never would have thought to test against, that would have made it into prod if I hadn’t renewed the code.

> It doesn’t matter how long you’re letting it run. If you aren’t reviewing the output, you have no way of knowing when it changes untested behavior.

You’re focused on the output , I’m focused on the behavior. Thats the difference. Just like when I delegate a task to either another developer or another company like the random Salesforce integration or even a third party API I need to integrate with.

Unfortunately you are not equipped to observe and test all or even most of the behavior of a non-trivial system.

And if you attempt to treat every module in your system like it’s untrusted 3rd party code you’ll run into severe complexity and size limits. No one codes large systems like that because it’s not possible. There are always escape hatches and entanglements.

Actual a little company you might have heard of called Amazon does…

Jeff Bezos mandated it in 2002.

https://konghq.com/blog/enterprise/api-mandate

AWS S3 by itself is made up of 200+ micro services

Except that they don’t. The API mandate gets violated all the time. And no one at Amazon actually treats every other team as a 3rd party.

Have you worked at Amazon?

I am not saying they treat every other team as a third party. I am saying they treat the code itself as a black box with well defined interfaces. They aren’t reaching in to another services data store to retrieve information.

How do you know someone is ex-Amazon ? Don’t worry they’ll tell you.

I haven’t mentioned it 5 times already so you can be pretty sure I haven’t. I know too many people that have worked there to ever make that mistake.

But more importantly, have you worked there in the last decade?

Then you have know idea how Amazon works. I was there from 2020-2023z.