Revisiting Joel's Test - exe.dev blog

kept by blakbelt78 sep 02

Joel Spolsky's original twelve‑question Joel Test remains valid, but nine additional agent‑focused questions form the Shelley Test for modern software teams.

What's in a codebase?
Coding agents lower the cost of rewriting codebases, but codebases encode tacit knowledge and coevolve with people, preserving value that specs alone cannot capture.
also on Joel Spolsky, #ai-coding, #software-engineering, #developer-tools
How Kenn is doing Agentic Engineering – Wes McKinney
Wes McKinney details Kenn's agentic engineering process, emphasizing human oversight in design and verification, using custom tools like Superpowers and roborev to maintain quality while merging hundreds of PRs weekly with low bug rates.
also on roborev, #automation, #ai-coding, #software-engineering, #developer-tools
Claude Is Not a Compiler - exe.dev blog
Claude surpasses a compiler by enabling engineers to make cross‑stack decisions—from strategy to machine code—through iterative agent loops, turning vibe‑engineering into real engineering.
also on exe.dev, #automation, #ai-coding, #software-engineering, #developer-tools
I rewrote PostHog's SQL parser, 70x faster, while barely looking at the code
PostHog's engineer used parallel Claude Code sessions to rewrite their SQL parser, achieving a 70x speedup by fuzzing against the old ANTLR-based parser as an oracle.
also on ClickHouse, #ai-coding, #software-engineering, #developer-tools
Karpathy's Autoresearch found a 3-year-old bug in our query engine (and improved performance by 11%) - PostHog
PostHog used a Karpathy-style AI agent to find a 3-year-old ClickHouse bug where `toTimeZone()` disabled primary key usage, and the fix cut query time by 37%
also on ClickHouse, #ai-coding, #software-engineering, #developer-tools