@unclebobmartin’s Agents Build in Hours, Then Hunt Their Own Bugs

A week of work in an hour or two.

“It’s just so cool,” @unclebobmartin writes. He talks the system over with his agents and they develop a spec. They build the system, which would have taken him a week, in an hour or two. Then he has them run the crapper, dryer and mutator checks, and they find dozens of bugs, oversights and dead code while cleaning things up.

Reading code is a liability.

Asked whether developers still need to read code to keep agents from making a mess, he disagreed. “Humans are slow at code. Agents are fast. So reading code is a liability.” The code still has to be clean enough for agents to keep managing and maintaining it, he says. Deterministic tools that measure code quality and test coverage can check that.

Those tools are named crapper, dryer and mutator, and he also uses uml-viewer for a high-level picture of the system structure. Clean code still matters, he says: “Agents that make messes slow down and burn tokens.” Eventually the mess gets so bad they can no longer make progress.

And how much steering? “Lots of steering. That’s the only way. There’s never been another way, even with human programmers.”