Midjourney/Every illustration.

My AI Had Already Fixed the Code Before I Saw It

Compounding engineering turns every pull request, bug fix, and code review into permanent lessons your development tools apply automatically

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Ross K 21 days ago

Excellent idea on compounding, thank you. As a non-developer, I am able to share your article with Claude Code, discuss how it applies to our project, and (hopefully) implement it correctly.

Ola Fakomi 21 days ago

@rkilburn I should try this with the project I'm buidling Thanks

@blaine.wishart 21 days ago

The synergy between this piece and programming as advoced with Solve.it (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=solve.it+howard) is amazing. I'm anxious to set up three agents. The TDD cycle here is on a different level than TDD in Smalltalk 20 years ago, but the spirit is the same. In modest coding efforts with claude over the past 2 months, I've seen glimpses of the cycle you describe, but I had not realized the power of an extreme cycle that leverages an agentic model. This post was worth my subscription as it pulled so much practce and history together,

@nysu.gfx 21 days ago

You mention a lot of stuff in here, and it would be really cool to get more examples of this stuff and references. I don't know what llms.txt is. I'm also very curious how you get claude to add review comments to its own memories.

@ciprian.tomoiaga 11 days ago

@nysu.gfx https://llmstxt.org/

@deepak.nautiyal 21 days ago

Brilliant piece, and should we share this with Dwarkesh, if continual learning , at least in the embryonic stage is solved 😀!

Christian Graham 21 days ago

Great read. I shared with GPT 5.0, explained my existing report writing process - and it came back with a tailored approach I can use to continuously improve it.

Ola Fakomi 21 days ago

As a product designer who recently started coding more, this is so insightful. I particularly feel more at peace because of step 5. My worry has always been on having a baseline level of fundamental knowledge, even as I use AI tools to assist the building process.

Peter Orlovacz 19 days ago

I feel two ways about this: it's a good way to show structure and progression to those coming from a non-technical direction. On the other hand, it is just a list of well-known (does not mean always practiced) good engineering practices for engineers.
Of course, replacing humans with machines may speed up the feedback cycle.

@CloudNeato about 13 hours ago

Enjoyed this article. It would be great to see a follow piece that talks more about recruiting/hiring/onboarding a first engineer in a "compounding engineering" environment. How to find the best candidates to thrive in this type of environment would be an interesting discussion. I don't think the challenge is limited to converting an existing team.