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Re:Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents... by Selkirk on Sunday October 11, 2026 @12:34PM (#50045013)
I really like this writeup. I find the metaphor satisfying, though there's a reason metaphor receded into the bushes as a practice in XP. A great metaphor is great to have, but they don't always exist. Fortunately with organizational systems, things will tend to rhyme. For example, a role that "Verifies that all processes have been followed before anything merges" seems like it could fit many different systems. We're at this fun stage where people are just trying stuff and I love it. I hope we get more info from this experiment.
Re:Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents... by rafiss on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:52AM (#50058199)
Thanks. Yeah I agree that it’s not always a good fit. There are plenty of places where we bent the metaphor or just ignored it; like for example I also added a "test classifier" checklist that is really just about software engineering practices with no attempt at connecting it to doctors.

As we consider bringing this pipeline into larger repositories with more developers, we have discussed whether it's time to drop the metaphor. The last thing we want is for someone new to a project to have to learn the inner mechanics of the medical industry at the same as figuring what the hell is happening in a gigantic codebase.