Lead Architect Reveals His Rules for Coding Agents

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Carlos Kelkboom (1:00)

Agents I found are bad at making changes and are good at doing it one shot. I go as huge as possible.

Patrick Akil (1:06)

Do you look at the output? Do you review the code?

Carlos Kelkboom (1:09)

Oh yeah, and I throw it away if I don't like it. If I don't understand it, I throw it away.

Patrick Akil (1:13)

This is Carlos Kelkboom, one of the best engineers I know. His main agent doesn't even touch files.

Carlos Kelkboom (1:19)

Wow, it's focused on only one thing. How am I ever going to get a good answer out of this thing if the only thing it looks at is, can I write the code for you? Right now. So I just forced it to never do that again. They are good at writing code, but not at engineering an application. I think we need to get rid of the heap. The heap just needs to go completely. We don't need pointers, we don't need dynamic memory. If for some reason AI disappears, everything will fall down.

Patrick Akil (1:46)

Do you think that will happen?

Carlos Kelkboom (1:48)

I see three things happening.

Patrick Akil (1:53)

What is the single biggest thing that you would say engineering has really shifted towards, which is different than a few years ago?

Carlos Kelkboom (2:01)

So first, the thing that I'm seeing that I don't really like, and that is that I've seen that cooperation and coordination is starting to slip away. So the importance of pull requests, people working together, commenting on their own pull requests, on other people's pull requests.

Some people are even saying a pull request might disappear. And what I'm seeing is a more individual way of developing and less cooperation. You work together with your agents, but you don't work together with your team anymore. Or at least that's the trend I'm seeing, and I think it's a dangerous trend.

Patrick Akil (2:38)

Why do you think that is specifically? And for me, I have the assumption that in practice, it might be what we see online, kind of on Reddit, that's my bubble or YouTube, because there are a lot of solo developers that are kind of on the frontier of things.

But I don't know if that resonates what happens in bigger organizations, where there are still bigger teams and people collaborating with agents and each other.

Carlos Kelkboom (3:00)

Yeah, so I have the privilege of not being on any social media.

I don't have a Reddit account. I mean, I only use LinkedIn to talk to you.

I have absolutely zero interest in following social media, but I do read a lot and I read articles and I read white papers and I talk to a lot of companies and a lot of people in companies. And so there's a difference between building something fast and not finishing it and building something that you hope will last. And so it's that classic marathon versus sprint thing. And people building things by themselves usually don't push it that extra edge towards being completed. And that is, I think, what the difference is. Showing something on social media or on YouTube. Like, for example, you see a lot of people building games very fast. And the reason why I want to do air quotes is because the biggest problem with games is listening to your users, doing the game design correctly. And that is still something you can iterate with your agent, but you need to communicate to the world. So, I think people working within their bubble, not having to communicate with other people, but always was one of the most difficult things to do. I think that's only being enforced now, because you can show a lot of progress, but you do that by yourself.