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Re:Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents... by quadrifoliate on Sunday October 11, 2026 @12:26PM (#50044931)
Could you fix a bug in this codebase yourself, without the help of agents?

Maybe trying this would be a good experiment? Say route 10 or 20% of any future issues to the “Chief” to troubleshoot and fix directly, and record those for further work?

Re:Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents... by rafiss on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:44AM (#50058090)
Yes, the codebase still allows you to make a PR the normal way, and getting another engineer to review. That is, a human could make a PR totally by hand or by steering a Claude session on their machine.

I still find myself taking that approach fairly regularly. For most framework-level changes, or changes to core packages, I think the added scrutiny and deliberation is valuable. But for "leaf" components that don't have many dependents, using the hospital to move rapidly has been invaluable. I also encourage "old-fashioned" PRs for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding in a certain area of the code.

I like the control-group idea. It’s close to something we’re already building, where a human can label an issue to opt-in to write the plan or the code themselves. Routing a fixed % of issues that way would give us a baseline we don’t have right now.

Re:Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents... by quadrifoliate on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:05AM (#50066539)
To be clear, when I said "can you", I didn't mean "does the system allow this", more like "are you, the person I am speaking to who is the architect of the system, confident that you could make a fix to this system without the LLM's help?".

> I also encourage "old-fashioned" PRs for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding in a certain area of the code.

Yeah, this is kind of what I meant. I think in some future, these are going to be really valuable for maintainers.