Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48836911

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

I think using Command Center can lead to much better skills growth than any other agentic coding environment. Which is a lot like saying that a shrubbery is much taller than grass, when you need your skills to grow into a tree.

This is a problem that no-one has solved. I think we might have it solved by the end of the year (we've been doing deals with a lot of universities and are being pulled in that direction),

The things humans can offer over AIs: product sense, greater context, taste. Of these, taste (really: software architecture and design) is the one that's most fundamentally about software engineering skill. I wrote recently about this at https://self-service.mirdin.com/software-design-in-the-age-o...

The big problem: it's very hard to develop enough taste to be a general without actually being in the trenches. This goes for pretty much any field, including literal war.

I've trained about 500 software engineers. But all of them were working professionals, who would take the training back on the job each week and see all the lessons playing out in their own and their coworker's code. If they were just chatting with AI and never having to get halfway through a big feature only to realize that the design was just fundamentally flawed, rate of growth would probably be much slower.

In short: lots you can do to grow faster than someone who just stares at the Claude CLI all day and never opens an editor. But how to become actually good while still doing AI coding? Unsolved problem.

That was my life in my mid-late 20's.

But as I've gotten older, my sleep schedule has only gotten more messed up. Now I consider it a victory if I manage to go to sleep before the dawn.

> Very much so, obviously prefer something async if possible, just a .patch file could suffice I suppose, but could do a call to have a look if that's the only way :) Reach out to my email from my profile and we can coordinate :)

Cool, let's chat async then. Contacting you now.

Three things made that possible.

The first, obviously, is having Command Center.

The second is that a lot of those were fixes or UX improvements under 100 lines.

The third is, no joke, not sleeping. I've had quite a few 20+ hour days in the last 6 months. Some of that is work pressure, but also I've considered getting evaluated for a broken circadian rhythm.

> I'd be curious to see some of those PRs if you're saying you've essentially solved the holy paradox of "ship fast = shit code" or "ship slow = good code".

If you're serious, I'll be happy to get on a call and show you.

On the one hand, it is true that the website code was pushed 0 minutes before this announcement went up.

On the other hand, I tested just now on two different phones and didn't see any issues. Can you say in more detail what you expected vs. what actually happened?

There was an occlusion issue on some smaller screens, but it's been fixed now.

The basic answer is that it runs locally. If you turn telemetry off and don't use our free Gemini credits, it's trivial to verify that no traffic goes to our servers other than a tiny subscription check. For our enterprise customers, we offer a version that doesn't even do that. Everything stays between you and your model providers (and we support custom and local models).

SOC2 is still a work in progress. I'm a former security researcher with work featured in the New York Times, and I know that doing it right (and not going through Delve) takes time. I can tell you that we have passed a compliance check for a company in a highly-regulated space.

I didn't find your contact info, but I'm available at jimmy@cc.dev, and happy to discuss your needs.

The final moments before this launch announcement consisted of me twiddling my thumbs while waiting for our designer to upload any version he could get ready in time that is better than the previous version of our website. So we knew we'd be launching with a lot of imperfections in the visuals. Did test in mobile, but not on iPad.

But yes, that is indeed what happened. Multiple times, I'd talk to someone that I'd expect to not be reading the code at all (solo founder, mostly nontechnical), then I'd interview him in detail about his workflow and think "Huh, there was absolutely no point in there where he was reading stuff," and then I'd ask "So how much of your time is reading code?" "60, maybe 70%"

Doug has not signed up for it.

It's pretty expensive to measure even for small programs. It's also more of a relative than an absolute measure, i.e.: it scores two variants of the same codebase, but the raw scores aren't very meaningful on their own. So our goal had been to use this in the benchmark set we're working on when we release a standalone refactoring product.

But the more I think about this suggestion, the more I think: "Hmmm, why not?"

The most difficult code in the 1.0 release is some gymnastics to avoid the appearance of a concurrency conflict with a user running their own jj commands, made at the request of the person who introduced me to jj.

I can tell you that we do extensive testing, we figured out how to objectively measure the code quality on certain benchmark problems, empirically it's extremely helpful nearly all the time.

But in the general case: it is not actually possible to guarantee this.

That's because whether a change improves the code often depends on information which is literally not present in the codebase.

Some of these are more trite. E.g.: whether a comment is helpful or redundant slop depends on the audience.

Some are deeper. E.g.: whether a piece of duplication is good or bad depends on the intent, and that is often impossible to recover from the source. https://www.pathsensitive.com/2018/01/the-design-of-software...

A simpler example: There's a function that's never called. Should it be deleted?

There's a number of factors outside the codebase that determine the answer. Including the obvious one "Not if your next prompt is going to start using it."

Last year, we set to answer the question “If AI can write code 100x faster, then why aren’t you shipping 100x faster?” What we learned shocked us — even fairly nontechnical people and solo founders told us they were spending more than half of their development time reading the AI-written code. And much of the rest of the time was spent either de-slop-ping it, or wishing they had done so.

As luck turns out, our last two products were a tool that quickly onboards people to large codebases ( https://x.com/0xjimmyk/status/1873357324229984677 ) and trainings that taught deep concepts of code quality to CEOs, YC founders, and engineers at top companies ( mirdin.com ), so we were extremely well-positioned to solve these problems.

Command Center is an agentic coding environment focused on quality. With a few keypresses, you can start building 3 features at once and soon have 3 diffs ready, each consisting of 2000 changed lines across 50 files….

This is normally the point where you think “Crap, what now?”

With Command Center, at this point you simply click “Refactor,” and watch the vibed slop turn into readable robustness. Then you click “Generate Walkthrough,” and then suddenly, to read a 2000 line diff, instead of scrolling up and down trying to make sense of it, you just press the right arrow key 200 times. See something you don’t like? Click on line 37, type “Do this and all other network fetches in the background Cmd+Enter,” and you have a few more agents getting your code into final shape. Click or type “Commit,” “Push,” “Create PR” — you just shipped a high quality, non-slop feature

We’re striving to be the best at every step of the pipeline, but can just try Command Center in pieces wherever you feel your current workflow is weakest. We have users who do all their coding in Zed or the Codex app, and then jump over to Command Center for a walkthrough when it finishes running. There’s even a skill that will pop open a Command Center walkthrough from the environment of your choice. Or you can just keep Command Center running while you do your work elsewhere, and if your AI deletes anything, you have Command Center’s snapshots to the rescue.

We launched quietly last year and have been refining since. The quality and usability have kept going up, and Command Center is now ready for a lot more attention.

Since our quiet launch, we’ve seen at least a dozen other agentic coding environments appear….approximately all of which have the same feature set focused on the part which is already easy (generating the first version of the code) and with at best a shoddy answer to the hard part (everything that comes after). Command Center’s focus is making the hard parts easy.

Here’s what our users have to say:

“[The refactorings] give your LLM taste. I’ve never seen an LLM write code this good before.” — Doug Slater, Staff Engineer, Climavision

“With Command Center walkthroughs, I can get through a 400-line diff in less than half the time.” — Prateek Kumar, Platfor Engineer, Sumo Logic

This product is not for everyone. If you’re someone who preaches “the prompt is the source, the code is the compiler output,” then you probably won’t enjoy Command Center.

But if you want to uphold traditional engineering discipline while also shipping 20 PRs a day, then this is the environment for you.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48453002

Points: 69

# Comments: 32

It worked

It took me 1-2 years to learn circular breathing, but even just learning to play for 15 seconds on one breath can give the "oxygen high" from breathing so much.

I don't see how. Cases are decided by facts and law, not feelings -- except to the extent those feelings are probative of state of mind, which is relevant for some legal issues but not others. My understanding is that the crux of the case is on the extent to which a number of informal messages should be considered a binding contract.

Trying to go from a single admission like this to an overall legal conclusion is a lot like seeing a single line in a program and then concluding there's a bug -- without having ever seen the rest of the program. You might think "this line always crashes, " but actually it's never called (does not go to any matter at issue), or none of the terms mean what you think they mean, etc.

Have found in that roadmap things that would help me personally like making async functions dyn-compatible. Have not found the deeper stuff I thought you were hinting at.

Last year, I wanted to use the 5- line Result.flatten function, abs then found it had been stuck in experimental....for 5 years. That left me with no confidence of the language's dev velocity.

It's okay if your language has problems (I have plenty of criticisms of my favorite languages), but I find it odd and concerning how frequently I've seen Rust programmers try to deflect instead of engaging in criticism.

I actually have a huge systems programming background and identify as a systems programmer. C and C++ by and large do not have the problems I've written about. These things are Rust problems, not systems problems.

No, boxing everything does not magically make things more dyn-compatible. It will not magically solve the issue that tokio does a whole-program transformation that does its most restrictive checking only after all local checks have been resolved. It will not magically allow more reuse between datatypes. It will solve none of the problems I encountered... because if beginner-Rust could solve any of these problems, then they would have ceased to be problems for me by the time I became intermediate.

> Rust programmers tend to obsess over minimizing those tradeoffs to get abstractions that are zero-cost. So doing it “the rust way” is often very complicated and tricky to get right while satisfying the borrow checker and type system, but once found is lean, fast, clean, and safe.

You and I must be using very different definitions of "lean." For me, "complicated" and "lean" do not go together

Please respect the fact that I do not understand how one can like Rust without giving up caring about modularity.

I have pretty good reason for thinking this is a possibility. Directly, because the Rust experts I asked for help did in fact advocate giving up modularity. Indirectly, in that I've seen something similar but much stronger in a different language. That culminated in a conversation with several of the creators of that language, in which they argued their language was great for generic programming...while revealing some pretty basic holes in their understanding of generic programming (while calling me a "Haskell weenie," among other abuse). I am very confident in my conclusion about this other language community and not interested in getting into the details of this event. I am just sharing where I'm coming from, in not immediately dismissing this idea as too absurd to consider even when I have no other hypothesis.

I acknowledge that you feel personally insulted by me having a hypothesis that requires a large group of people behave in ways I consider strange. I have evidence for that hypothesis, and have been unable to find a better one. I hope you can see how the comment I am responding to crosses an extra line and is directly personally insulting.

I would very much like to come away from this discussion no longer believing that Rust programminh is at odds with modularity. I have shared some fairly basic and detailed criticisms, the ones I still remember after a year out of the language. Perhaps your can play a role in offering solutions to them -- or admit that these are indeed problems your hadn't noticed before or had gotten used to

For this family of examples, had been completely stymied by AsyncFnOnce not being released yet. IIRC it had been in the works for several years, was still an experimental feature when I was trying to use it, and I gave up after much frustration at trying to get a version of Rust with experimental features working under devenv (nix).

A subtraction then to my frustrations with Rust -- though I'd still be very wary of doing this, having seen how fragile higher-order functions have been in the past.