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points by bash-j 23 hours ago | hide | 0 comments

I have a similar issue where it ignores step by step instructions. I have a detailed step by step playbook and QA checklist to follow, but it will make up its own checklist with fewer items on it and say it's finished the job! I think about half my time is spent getting the very clever code it has written out of large singular files and into an organised structure which was specced from the beginning.

The distributed systems framing is right but it undersells the problem. In a traditional distributed system, each node runs code a human wrote and can reason about. When something fails, you trace the call chain and find the bug.

With multi-agent development, each agent generates code that no single human fully understands. The failure mode isn't a consensus problem or a network partition. It's a comprehension partition. Five agents each wrote part of the system. None of them hold a mental model of the whole. Neither does the human who orchestrated them. When it breaks, there is no call chain to trace because there was never a unified understanding of what the system was supposed to do at that level of specificity.

Yeah, just the other day I had asked it to do some work and then merge it into a develop branch.

"Done, merged to develop".

I test, feature not there.

"?" Claude: "Yeah, there's nothing for that feature in develop"

"I'm confused. You said above you merged it into develop." Claude: "I did say that but I didn't do it. Should I do it now?".

Me, thinking, "That depends, will you actually do it now?"