Tag: software quality

The strongest idea here is progressive hardening. Context documents tell an agent what the team believes, review agents catch violations that still require judgment, and deterministic checks enforce rules precise enough to encode. Repeated agent findings should become tests, linters, or structural checks whenever possible. That moves common verification toward a cheaper and more reliable layer instead of celebrating an ever-larger pile of prompts and reviewers.

The risk is that the harness becomes its own source of ceremony and drift. A living specification, scheduled audit, or self-improvement loop cannot certify its own correctness, and dense terminology does not make a control effective. The useful implementation path starts with observed failures: identify a recurring defect, state the constraint, decide who has authority, measure the check's false positives, and preserve human review for consequences that remain ambiguous. A harness should make the system easier to govern. If operating the harness becomes harder than understanding the code, it has moved complexity rather than reduced it.

This is a useful designer's notebook on software quality because it pushes quality out of the narrow "does it work" box and back into the felt experience of using a product. Speed, clarity, reliability, craft, and the absence of papercuts all matter, even when they do not show up as a failing test.

The Hacker News pushback is worth keeping next to it: quality is not only the absence of visible problems. It is also resilience under harder conditions, maintainability, security, and the cost of change. The mature version combines both views: users feel polish at the surface, while teams feel quality in how safely the system can keep evolving.