Shivom

Code is actually the right abstraction. Too often I see the future of software engineering diminished down to, effectively, writing and reviewing markdown files. Yes, it will be hard to review thousands of lines of agent code. But maybe the takeaway is that you want less code? Rather than just giving up ("well I guess we won't read the code, or we'll read this lossy markdown summary") this should be a signal forcing you to think about better systems. - How can we make our codebase more verifiable? For example, fast/robust/stable tests, or moving to a typed language. - How can we deslop or improve the architecture/abstractions of the code generated by agents? For example, spending more time up front on the codebase architecture/types before yolo generating all of the code. - How are we going to maintain and evolve this codebase over time? The slop compounds. One great solution here is... you guessed it, learning from the past decades of software engineering! For example, you might just have the wrong abstraction entirely, leading to a ton of duplicated code. I think the markdown folks *are* right in some ways. If you are using skills every day, for many different prompts and workflows, isn't that effectively "coding with markdown"? Kinda. There's been plenty of ink spilled on the merits and benefits of skills. To me, skills make your style of working legible for agents. They don't replace code and that's not really the point. In reality, there's this messy and constantly re-evolving future in which both of these things are true: 1. Skills (and markdown) are important for how you give input to the agents and ensure high-quality code & systems are created 2. Looking at the actual code will not be replaced by markdown summaries or a collection of spec documents that ignore the lower level details of the code In summary: reality has a surprising amount of detail (and nuance)!