You can get a lot done with agentic programming without going "all in" on a gastown-like system, but I think there is a minimum viable setup:
1. an adversarial agent harness that uses one agent to create a plan and implement it, and another to review the plan and code-review each step.
2. an agentic validation suite -- a more flexible take on e2e testing.
3. some custom skills that explain how to use both of those flows.
With this in place you can formulate ideas in a chat session, produce planning artifacts, then use the adversarial system to implement the plans and the validation layer to get everything working e2e for human review.
There are a lot of tools you can use for these things but I chose to just build the tooling in the repo as I go.
Claude already creates multiple agents for some projects just to keep context windows smaller. I don't think it'll be long before they offer a testing agent along with their planning agent.
I prefer having codex author plans and implement, and claude play reviwer. I do swap them from time to time and i have a lot of respect for claude 4.6 and 4.7 but for my domain I think codex does a better job with the authoring.
You're definitely burning more tokens with the back/forth and multi-step approach but assuming you swap who does the authoring from time to time you can definitely get the max out of each plan. Review doesn't use as many tokens.
How hard would it have been to create a test repo, make a branch with monolithic specs, make another branch with these scattered specs, run the same exact task against them both? Pick a few tasks. Run them a few times each. Analyze the results.
Where I live (California) there are basically no republicans in power. For a long time now. And we have more money and a better economic base than just about anywhere on the planet Earth.
So to all the partisans out there who are sure things would be better if "their side" had total control, I ask: what the hell is going on with California then?? We should be modeling the best governance in the country and even the world, but yet, our government is basically dysfunctional and our state is great despite it.
California has structural obstacles that don’t fit into partisan politics. Proposition 13 limits property tax collection, which warps housing development and many other factors. Also, California has high incomes, which means Californians pay more federal income tax, and the state receives less back in federal benefits, to the tune of almost $100 billion a year. Those are significant headwinds that the state would still have to deal with even if it was governed well.
Prop 13 is brought up a lot but it never made any sense to me that it also applies to commercial real estate used for businesses. I can see an argument for single family homes (primary dwellings) but property that large corporations own ? It makes no sense.
It was created by and for homeowners, but businesses aren't going to pass up a gift like that. It's actually worse for commercial property - building are owned by separate single purpose corporations, and if you want to sell the building, you sell fractions of the ownership in the corporation over time so there's never a big enough change to trigger a tax reassessment.
You really think california localities have a revenue problem? Prop 13 dos not limit property tax collection: it changes the distribution of it. It means I pay 40x more than my neighbor and that is very dumb, but whenver the city needs more revenue they just raise the rates.
The problem with Prop 13 is not about its effect on tax revenue.
Prop 13 is no different from rent control. It distorts the market and limits supply.
If a property owner can't afford the tax on their land, it means the land is under-utilized. SFHs should be replaced by townhomes which should be replaced by multi-family buildings and so on. That doesn't happen because people who bought a house 50 years ago for a few beads and pieces of gum don't have this market signal in the form of a higher property tax bill.
Where was it suggested that it caused a budget crisis? This started from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47938121 which said "Proposition 13 limits property tax collection, which warps housing development and many other factors."
Low turnover, political and financial opposition to building, and structurally higher costs. It's a tangled mess.
1. People are disincentivized to move - the longer you've lived in a home, the larger the effective subsidy (vs average property tax payer) becomes.
2. New homes are on the other end of that - you pay much more in taxes than the average. So the cost of new homes is higher.
3. The average home pays less than it costs the local government. This is largely true everywhere because of the cost of public schools, but Prop 13 makes it more pronounced in CA. So local governments have a huge disincentive to approve any housing, especially larger apartments or condos where school aged children could live.
4. Govs make up for the lower tax per home by charging very high development fees for new construction, which raises prices and lowers rates.
Bwuh yeah imagine living in a meteorological paradise that happens to be the world’s strongest economy with the nation’s best state school system with a diversity of culture bringing tangible everyday benefits like delicious food. Sounds horrible.
Sure, our streets are shit, our legislators are actively trying to ruin the tech industry, we spent $130B on 300 yards of train, policing in large cities is a disaster, and the "best state school system" translates into an education level at 29th/37th country-wide, building housing is impossible due to the world's worst permitting process, but otherwise...
Look, I don't mind paying a lot of taxes. If there's service you get for it. And I'm deeply in the blue camp. But CA leadership (state/county/city) is still an utter disaster and needs to be tossed out on its ear.
Yeah I don’t mind Californians shitting on California, by all means, strive for perfection. But… have you been to eastern Kentucky? There’s levels to this.
Also, low key, visit eastern Kentucky. Gorgeous countryside, Red River Gorge. Genuine people, I once stayed in someone’s cabin over Thanksgiving and they insisted on bringing me a fresh Thanksgiving meal, a gesture I’ll never forget.
> what the hell is going on with California then??
Only being the 4th or 5th largest economy in the world.
California's own voters did the housing crisis to themselves by passing Prop 13. You can't pin that on any political party.
I don't know who's responsible for the clusterfuck that is PG&E.
Water supply and farmer water rights are another contentious issue. The seeds for that were sown in the late 19th and early 20th century. It's got nothing to do with Democratic domination of state politics today.
Other than expensive housing and electricity, and a sometimes precarious water supply, the state is basically fine. What's this political dysfunction you speak of?
> And we have more money and a better economic base than just about anywhere on the planet Earth.
Because of the massive historical defense, tech and entertainment industries all under one roof for decades, bringing in crazy money. The blue politicians that built California as the defense, tech and movie powerhowse decades ago, have nothing in common with those running California today, so California staid successful despite it's current blue leadership not because of it.
It would be amazing for things to be as simple as "vote blue and become rich like California", but that's not how it works. It's more like rich people tend to vote blue, rather than voting blue makes you rich.
When the private sector brings trillions in revenue and local taxes, then the current political competence decline, corruption and mismanagement, inflicts a much smaller splash damage than in places that have less money so there's no one size fits all magic solution.
Define "For a long time now". The Republican party controlled California for 75% of the 1900s with the Democrats coming in power in the last quarter of the century. This is well after California established itself as an economic powerhouse which was greatly aided by the wild West attitude and things like Santa Clara being the location of 20 superfund sites due to all of the ground pollution caused by the semiconductor industry. California is also home to the greatest environmental disaster known as the Salton Sea. You are either going to have to concede that either the economic base of California was established by Republican and exploitative pro-business practices or that Democrats manufactured some of the worst environmental catastrophes.
> Define "For a long time now". The Republican party controlled California for 75% of the 1900s with the Democrats coming in power in the last quarter of the century.
50 years seems like plenty to justify "a long time now"
That's easily answered. They think California is a hellhole that everyone with means is fleeing. "Vote for Democrats to turn your state into California" is a great way to get people on both sides to vote for their own preferred side.
California has an identical problem to Texas: Local big money industry responsible for a large part of the state's GDP, and ample money to take total control of the local Single Party machine. New York was like this once, possibly still is.
I don't think "What the hell is going on with California?" is a great example. I've lived in many states throughout my life, from deep red to navy blue, and now I live in California. It's definitely the best place I've ever lived, and neither me nor anyone in my family wants to leave any time soon. Is California a flaw-free utopia? No. Does it have its shit together in more ways than most other states? I'd say yes. Also, being a few hours drive from the ocean, a few hours from a city that's a major cultural center, a few hours from the beautiful Sierras and winter sports, and a few hours from many other pristine and interesting outdoor amenities is and added bonus. Extra bonus, year round decent weather, relatively clean air, clean water, a great university system. Extra extra bonus, nobody in my house has to worry about being hunted down because of the color of their skin or their national origin or their sexual preferences, or because they had a miscarriage.
Not exactly the hell hole red staters make it out to be.
Totally, like I said right there, it is a great state!
But the governance is not great. That was actually the whole point I was making. And getting back to that: The getting things done is abysmal. Taxes are high. Spending is loose. No progress is made on things the state takes on as priorities (housing costs, high speed rail, homelessness). It's just not well managed. But from the "one side good, other side bad" POV it should be great, no pesky republicans to get in the way. I don't know if there's a lesson there but it's an intersting question to ask.
Is there any example of good State governance to point to, though? Every State is on the spectrum of dysfunction. I'd argue (and I am aware that it is a blatantly partisan point of view) that every additional republican you add to the mix will increase dysfunction. The party's entire M.O. currently is to increase chaos wherever possible, grief the other side, and generally troll everyone not like them; and I say this as someone who voted (R) decades ago. The (R) of today have no governance principle besides sowing chaos and ending effective governance, and CA would be even worse if Sacramento had to deal with having a significant number of them around gumming everything up.
I thought Larry Hogan did pretty well in Maryland. Debate about the surplus he left being a sleight-of-hand or not, I didn't feel that Maryland was dysfunctional.
Baltimore however, yes. Hoping this latest mayor can finish his term without getting arrested for corruption, as is tradition. The city council is worse.
You clearly have a low opinion of republicans. I do too! Where we differ is that I have a low opinion of democrats too. I see many dem partisans say how much better they are than republicans and overall I’m not seeing good governance.
Yea, I definitely wasn't clear: With (D)'s we see a spectrum from incompetence to uselessness, and bad outcomes from good intentions. With (R)'s, the spectrum instead includes malice, griefing, cruelty, and deliberate sabotage of governance. Neither are good for governance, but I know which one I'd rather have.
Yeah there are a lot of pathologies on both sides.
Democrats, for example, have loved to stoke the class war for the last 10+ years. Every week you hear a new take on how billionaires could solve homelessness or cancer or something if only they were taxed more. The left wing radicals are just as bad for America. Partisans hate it but the only true path out of this mess is centrism.
Not the OP but I have some… similar experience. When you run a high availability service without a full ops team, reliable infrastructure is non-negotiable. Burn out has to be managed.
In my “repo os” we have an adversarial agent harness running gpt5.4 for plan and implementation and opus4.6 for review. This was the clear winner in the bake-off when 5.4 came out a couple months ago.
Re-ran the bake-off with 4.7 authoring and… gpt5.4 still clearly winning. Same skills, same prompts, same agents.md.
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