This coding agent I’m building is getting interesting.
It feels meaningfully different from most coding agents, and part of that is philosophical. I’ve been working through a new way of thinking about agent design, and now I’m at the stage where the system can handle a little more complexity.
Today’s projects were fun. The one I spent the most time on was this prompt:
“A blog written entirely in Golang with templates, using sqlite as a backend. Like LessWrong, but for educated toddlers. It should support tags, comments, user signup, and posting. Make it colorful, but needlessly technical at the same time. A kind of maximally minimal or minimally maximal nerdy playschool brutalist aesthetic.”
That one went surprisingly well.
Honestly, these test prompts are half the fun. They’re evaluation, sure, but they’re also creative provocation. A good test prompt doesn’t just measure capability. It exposes shape. Taste. Failure modes. Weird little hidden assumptions. Sometimes it tells you more about the architecture than a benchmark ever could.
The irreducible ticket system
What really got me thinking, though, was the internal ticket system.
Right now it’s still basic. It’s project-specific and tied into memory and planning. But even at that level, it’s already making something obvious: a lot of human ticket systems are mostly UI theater.
That isn’t an insult. Human systems need ceremony. They need visibility, reassurance, social legibility, handoff rituals, little cardboard sets that make coordination feel real and stable. But once you start decomposing those same systems for agents, the fog burns off fast.
What’s left is a more interesting question:
What is the irreducible minimum structure needed for coordinated work?
Which parts are genuinely functional?
Which parts are compliance costumes?
Which parts only exist because humans need to look at the machine and feel that order is happening?
When you abstract project management into machine-friendly APIs, some pieces become more important than ever, and others vanish like stage props after closing night.