AI should help us produce better code

https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/better-code/

by simonw • 4 months ago

12 2 4 months ago

nadis• 4 months ago

"I like to think about shipping better code in terms of technical debt. We take on technical debt as the result of trade-offs: doing things "the right way" would take too long, so we work within the time constraints we are under and cross our fingers that our project will survive long enough to pay down the debt later on.

The best mitigation for technical debt is to avoid taking it on in the first place."

This is actually something I've been thinking about a lot, to the point that I'm now building agentic experiences to try to help make it easier to create and maintain better code and iterate in an AI-centric way while building software.

"Embrace the compound engineering loop"

Agreed! I feel like making it easier for AI agents to create high-quality code that's easy to test, iterate on, and maintain (without adding tech debt) is crucial here.

markrogersjr• 4 months ago

Thanks, Simon, for the post. I love the idea of compound engineering, will try that out.

I recently wrote an agent skill that helps coding agents produce better code: https://inmimo.me/blog/tighten/

TLDR: declarative style, locality of reference, and comparisons to Anthropic’s code-simplifier plugin. Would love to get your feedback!

AI should help us produce better code

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