> Why not? Who says that? Who proved that system understanding is not just more complex pattern matching?

I'm not in the camp of "system understanding is just more complex pattern matching"

but I am absolutely in the camp of "there are many tasks where pattern matching is just as effective as actual understanding"

but i also wonder to what extent this needs to be its own thing or if this is just something that it looks like we need but really people just need to shovel more stuff into their data warehouse / data lake that you never had reason to before, because now that's all fodder for agentic search

the only time i reach for official MCP is when they offer features that are not available via API - and this annoys me to no end (looking at you Figma, Hex)

The way I think of it, the main characteristic of agentic search is just that the agent can execute many types of adhoc queries

It’s not about a file system

As I understood it early RAG systems were all about performing that search for the agent - that’s what makes that approach “non agentic”

But when I have a database that has both embeddings and full text and you can query against both of those things and I let the agent execute whatever types of queries it wants - that’s “agentic search” in my book

"Assign agents the biggest piece justifiable. I can summarize a product outcome or a feature in two lines. That’s what goes on the ticket. Let the agents figure out subtasks when the work is ready for review, not before. Once you break an initiative into technical issues upfront, the outcome gets lost and the focus shifts to minutiae."

This is not about the ticket being well defined, this is about the agent having the larger context of what you are trying to do

e.g. spend time creating a skill about how to query production logs

No such faith comforts the software engineer. Much of the complexity he must master is arbitrary complexity, forced without rhyme or reason by the many human institutions and systems to which his interfaces must conform. These differ from interface to interface, and from time to time, not because of necessity but only because they were designed by different people, rather than by God."

- Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet

    hs.hotkey.bind({"ctrl"}, "D", function()
      hs.grid.show()
    end)

(1) ctrl-d to see the grid, (2) type the letter where you want the top left corner of your window to be, (3) type the letter where you want the bottom right corner to be

window resized

Throw in some simulated user interactions in a staging environment with a bunch of agents acting like customers a la StrongDM so you can catch the bugs earlier

this was already happening even before AI - human review is limited, linting is limited, type checking is limited, automated testing is limited

if all of these things were perfect at catching errors then we would not need tracing and observability of production systems - but they are imperfect and you need that entire spectrum of things from testing to observability to really maintain a system

so if you said - hey I'm going to remove this biased, error prone, imperfect quality control step and just replace it with better monitoring... not that unreasonable!

The real world alignment problem is humans using AI to do bad stuff

The latter problem is very real

On the other end are the hardcore user orchestrating a bunch of agents, not sitting there watching one run, so they don’t care about these logs at all

In the middle are the engineers sitting there watching the agent go

OTP fits agents like a glove.

No difference between that and using the bash tool - except you can keep the keys on the MCP server