> Claude wasn’t just a compiler here. I never handed off a task and let an agent make a bunch of decisions in order to reduce it to practice.

> I’d say that, in all the ways that matter, I understand the code.

I think the dissonance here is really important, and not a bad thing at all. A lot of the decision _were_ handed off the the AI, but they weren't the decisions the author cared about. This is a big selling point of AI! If something is doable with a computer, it’ll figure it out. 30 minutes and 200m tokens later, it’ll take any idea and declare “the feature is fully implemented.”

The hard part is figuring out where to inject that friction, so you can see where it's making decisions for you that matter. The author approached this by incrementally building the thing, reviewing and poking and prodding at every step. A week of attention following a bunch of design discussions is fast, but that's still not trivially cheap.

I want to see us talk more about the decision exhaust of agents, because the better the models get, the more decisions we'll want them to make.

I wrote a bit more here: https://tern.sh/blog/compiler-never-says-no/