Tyler Fox
9.2K posts
Tyler Fox
@smileyborg
Building things with software.
Compilers are deterministic. Give them the same code with the same compiler settings, and you'll always receive the same binary. You can take responsibility for your software at the code level. LLMs, on the other hand, are stochastic. Even if you set the temperature to zero, you're likely to get different responses on the same prompt. Therefore, you need to understand the code it produces if you want to take ownership and responsibility for it.
It's now been around 4 months since my open-source dcg tool was first released, and I know from hearing from tons of users that it has saved countless people from disaster at the hands of overeager Claude Code agents. I've continued to make various performance improvements and added additional preset packs to the project, most recently for the Railway API after the recent and infamous incident where someone blamed Claude for wiping their production database. Because of the way dcg is implemented as a "pre-tool-use hook" in Claude Code, there was no way to use it in Codex, since Codex didn't support that kind of hook at all. Until a week or so ago, when they finally added it. So I'm now pleased to say that the latest version of dcg has full support for Codex (plus it also works for gemini-cli if anyone is really using that outside of the 'Plex!). If you're not familiar with dcg yet, I highly recommend checking it out. It's unthinkable to me now to use any coding agent that doesn't support it; it feels like speeding on the highway without a seatbelt on (or more accurately, with a sharp knife strapped to the steering wheel pointed at your heart). Agents just can't be trusted to not occasionally do crazy things that seem sensible to them at the moment, but which are wildly destructive and often irreversible. These bouts of temporary madness often occur soon after compactions, or as a result of context rot caused by excessively long sessions. Not only does dcg mechanically prevent the agents from being able to do that, it explains to them why it did that specifically, and offers them safe alternatives custom-tailored to the specific commands they tried to run. The more agents you have running at the same time on the same project, the more dcg goes from a nice thing to have to being totally indispensable if you don't want to constantly worry about one rogue agent wiping out the work of the other agents with a misguided "git reset --hard HEAD" command. The dcg utility itself is written in hyper-optimized, memory-safe Rust and uses minimal system resources. Because it's totally mechanical (unlike the auto-approve feature in Claude Code, which uses an AI model that adds latency), you can't even notice any delay from it running on every command. dcg is NOT just a cookbook of canned forbidden commands; frontier models are too smart and resourceful to actually be constrained by such a simplistic approach. When they're prevented from running a command one way, they'll try another way; if that also doesn't work, they'll whip up an ad-hoc Bash script or Python program to do what they want. But dcg can detect that as well using its advanced ast-grep mode (which only kicks in when dealing with such heredoc scripts, so that the faster regex-only path can be used when applicable). It's also very quick and easy to expand and customize dcg by creating your own custom preset packs to add to the 50 or so included packs. Just ask Codex to study the existing presets and explain what you want to protect against in your own custom API or tooling, or in a third-party project that's not currently included by default in dcg. So, remember: Friends don't let friends vibe code without dcg. Protect yourself from your agents, and protect them from themselves. You can get it here: github.com/Dicklesworthst… It installs in under a minute on Linux or Mac using the curl-bash one-liner command shown in the README, and automatically detects any supported agent harnesses installed on your machine and configures them for you to use dcg. And if you decide it's not for you, it can be fully uninstalled in seconds using the provided command.
Allbirds, the shoe brand, now says it's an AI compute company.
It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now. It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.
