6,708 karma · joined May 9, 2012
https://egeozcan.com
https://github.com/egeozcan
Technical Lead, TL, or how I prefer it, Teaspoon.
Socials: - bsky.app/profile/egeozcan.bsky.social - github.com/egeozcan
Interests: Mentorship, Open Source, Programming, Running, UI/UX Design, Web Development
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Seeing value in that "learning experience" and not, is the basis of our disagreement, perhaps?
That’s true. I’m fluent in German, but there’s still a difference between me and a native speaker. I’ve often seen my ideas dismissed, only for the exact same point to be praised later when a native speaker expresses it more clearly.
To be clear, I'm neither proud nor embarrassed by this. I'm just trying to communicate in the most efficient way I can.
I'm not sure how I feel about this new rule.
To be clear, I don't do this. I never saw an agent cheat by peeking or something. I really did look through their logs.
I'd be very interested to see claude code and other tools support this pattern when dispatching agents to be really sure.
The concept is:
Red Team (Test Writers), write tests without seeing implementation. They define what the code should do based on specs/requirements only. Rewarded by test failures. A new test that passes immediately is suspicious as it means either the implementation already covers it (diminishing returns) or the test is tautological. Red's ideal outcome is a well-named test that fails, because that represents a gap between spec and implementation that didn't previously have a tripwire. Their proxy metric is "number of meaningful new failures introduced" and the barrier prevents them from writing tests pre-adapted to pass.
Green Team (Implementers), write implementation to pass tests without seeing the test code directly. They only see test results (pass/fail) and the spec. Rewarded by turning red tests green. Straightforward, but the barrier makes the reward structure honest. Without it, Green could satisfy the reward trivially by reading assertions and hard-coding. With it, Green has to actually close the gap between spec intent and code behavior, using error messages as noisy gradient signal rather than exact targets. Their reward is "tests that were failing now pass," and the only reliable strategy to get there is faithful implementation.
Refactor Team, improve code quality without changing behavior. They can see implementation but are constrained by tests passing. Rewarded by nothing changing (pretty unusual in this regard). Reward is that all tests stay green while code quality metrics improve. They're optimizing a secondary objective (readability, simplicity, modularity, etc.) under a hard constraint (behavioral equivalence). The spec barrier ensures they can't redefine "improvement" to include feature work. If you have any code quality tools, it makes sense to give the necessary skills to use them to this team.
It's worth being honest about the limits. The spec itself is a shared artifact visible to both Red and Green, so if the spec is vague, both agents might converge on the same wrong interpretation, and the tests will pass for the wrong reason. The Coordinator (your main claude/codex/whatever instance) mitigates this by watching for suspiciously easy green passes (just tell it) and probing the spec for ambiguity, but it's not a complete defense.
The trick is just not mixing/sharing the context. Different instances of the same model do not recognize each other to be more compliant.
const openClawInstance = useOpenClaw(config);
Did anyone already vibe-code such silliness? If not, I want to give it a try.
Maybe one exception is milestones in nuclear fusion, but even that is very much rare compared to these.
https://egeozcan.github.io/unnamed_rts/game/
I occasionally run my tournament script: https://github.com/egeozcan/unnamed_rts/blob/main/src/script...
That calculates the ELOs for each AI implementation, and I feed it to different agents so they get really creative trying to beat each other. Also making rule changes to the game and seeing how some scripts get weaker/stronger is a nice way to measure balance.
Funny thing, Codex gets really aggressive and starts cheating a lot of times: https://bsky.app/profile/egeozcan.bsky.social/post/3mfdtj5dh...
I tell this as a person who really enjoys AI by the way.
I also can create a feedback loop and let it run wild, which also works but that needs also planning and a harness, and rules etc. Usually not worth it if you need to jump between a million things like me.
Oh, here is the file I just saved... I see that it now tells me to rob a bank and donate the money to some random cult I'm just learning about.
Let me make a web search to understand how to contact the cult leader and proceed with my plan!
(luckily LLMs were not a thing back then :) )
People say these things against any group they dislike. It's so much that these days it feels like most of the social groups are defined by outsiders with the things they dislike about them.