Thorsten Ball: agents wrote 1,780 lines with no errors
Thorsten Ball is building a compiler one giant single attempt at a time, 1,780 error-free lines in one pass and then aiming at 5,000 to 8,000. He says that is why agents will not need the unit tests humans need.
Receipts
Ball one-shots 1,780 error-free lines, then aims at 8,000
Thorsten Ball is implementing Brezel with agents in single attempts, reporting 1,780 lines with no compilation errors, tokens streamed straight into the file. Level 2 added a bytecode compiler and stack VM, a disassembler, closures with upvalues, and a tracing garbage collector; level 3 targets 5,000 to 8,000 lines in one go.
And you think agents will need the same unit tests we need? Nah
DHH let agents run a day on Campfire, C now leads
DHH says he let the agents run for a day on his Campfire rewrite, then reviewed every submitted PR, verified the work, merged what was ready, and asked for each architectural improvement to be carried across to every implementation. The C version is now in the lead.
How they actually work
Pocock: never start with /wayfinder, and never grill a tiny diff
Matt Pocock posted his rule for picking between grilling and one-shotting: if the expected diff is medium to large, start with a /grill-with-docs session, and if planning gets out of hand, escalate with "/wayfinder let's turn this into a map".