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nulone

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Orchestration buys parallelism, not coherence. More agents means more drift between assumptions. Past a point you're just generating merge conflicts with extra steps.

The “craftsman to Ikea factory manager” line from the interview is the real headline here. AI does the fun creative stuff, you get stuck reviewing 2000 lines you didn’t write. Revert rate tells you more than any “10x” claim.

Cognitive overhead is real. Spent the first few weeks fixing agent mess more than actually shipping. One thing that helped: force the agent to explain confidence before anything irreversible. Deleting a file? Tell me why you're sure. Pushing code? Show me the reasoning. Just a speedbump but it catches a lot. Still don't buy the full issue→PR dream though. Too many failure modes.

I can never remember jq syntax.

Whenever I need to transform JSON, I spend 20 minutes guessing filters until something works.

So I built a CLI tool: give it input JSON and desired output, it generates the jq filter.

Example:

  Input:
  [{"name": "Alice", "email": "alice@example.com"},
   {"name": "Bob"},
   {"name": "Charlie", "email": "charlie@example.com"}]

  Wanted:
  ["alice@example.com", "charlie@example.com"]

  Generated:
  [.[] | select(.email != null) | .email]
How it works:

1. Takes your input/output examples

2. Generates a filter, runs jq, verifies the output matches

3. If wrong, retries automatically

Works with local models (Ollama) or cloud (OpenAI/Anthropic).

~450 tests, MIT licensed.

Curious what edge cases break it.

Solid primitive. Two questions:

1. Crash edge case: If an agent executes a side-effect and dies before signing the receipt, is that action orphaned? Any WAL-style intent/completion model?

2. Multi-step workflows: Do receipts chain natively (parent pointers/Merkle) or via external linking? (I see storage/ledgers are out of scope, but curious about the linkage design.)

The negative proof angle (proving AI didn't touch prod) is compelling for compliance.