colescodes

i thought the whole article was satire… till i realised it wasnt

The Dagestan kebab shop guy left a trail though.

Commits, has a PR thread, maybe a ticket. There's something to dig into, and an agent is decent at excavating it.

Ask the agent why X and not Y about its own code and you get a fresh answer made up on the spot with no connection to what happened when it was written.

The bewildered feeling is doing real work, I think. Reading my own code I'm checking it against a design I already have in my head. Reading someone else's I have to rebuild the design first, and that's where most of the bugs turn up.

What surprised me is that writing the ticket myself didn't help much. The agent satisfies it in ways I wouldn't have picked, so I'm still rebuilding.

git-absorb is new to me, thanks.

Author here. This came out of the last couple of weeks at work, where review has crowded out writing code because teammates and agents both produce it faster than anyone reads it. The short version: review the approach before the lines, and give AI-generated changes less benefit of the doubt, since fluency no longer signals correctness.

I'd try Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B or 27B with a temperature of around 0.6. You'd need to offload some of it to RAM though. I've had okay luck with Gemma 4 12B with a temperature of 1.0 but it will miss things a lot :(