Linklog

A browsable queue of Wikipedia rabbit holes and evergreen YouTube videos that have been popular on Hacker News.

Jason Swett argues that agents only write useful tests if they are given a concrete process to follow. Models may know about TDD in the abstract, but they default to vague, performative, or overcomplicated tests.

Basing the agent loop on “specify, encode, fulfil” gives the agent an executable target, keeps speculative implementation (code/feature bloat) in check, and makes refactoring easier to review.

John Smart’s Transcension Hypothesis proposes that advanced entities or civilisations may not expand outward across the standard universe indefinitely. Instead, they may transcend our observable frame by moving inward toward denser, more computationally efficient, or more information-rich domains.

A case study in agentic engineering at scale: for five months an OpenAI team shipped an internal product with zero manually-written lines of code.

Every line, application logic, tests, CI, docs, observability and tooling, was written by Codex, across roughly a million lines and 1,500 merged PRs from a small team.

They estimate a 10x speedup over hand-written code.