Tactical Coding Assistants

Over the past 15 months I have been actively working with LLM’s in my job as a software engineer. I have had many moments where I thought singularity was here, but then almost immediately after I would see the agent fall flat on its face. I have become interested in figuring out when and why these new tools fail, in the hope that it can help me use these tools to their maximum potential while still keeping control over the quality of what I commit. In this short article, I want to expand on a recent observation.

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In the book ‘A Philosophy of Software Design’ by John K. Ousterhout, a great analogy is made between two different modes of development: tactical and strategic programming.