Stephen Downes

This is a pretty good look at the design of a coding agent; this is a mechanism that uses an AI model to create new software. It's clearly written and well illustrated. It's interesting because it essentially describes a coding task model - that is, what people are actually doing when they write software. I picked this up via Benjamin Riley, who writes a critical summary of the AI coding process outlined here, calling it an ouroboros, a snake that eats its own tail. "AI writes the code. AI reviews the code. AI checks the deployment. When it breaks, the answer is more AI. The loop has no exit condition...The company that sells AI coding tools cannot build a quality product with its own AI coding tools." With last week's release of Claude Code's harness there has been a wave of similar posts. It's clear that Claude Code, at least, does not use its own code as input; there's a specific constraint against it, and the ouroboros problem is well understood and accounted for.