German Attanasio

The best founders in the world like @elonmusk or @tobi “go ultra-hardcore on deletion and simplification.” Luca Ferrari says Bending Spoons employs this idea of “Relentless Simplification” across their businesses: “Humans have a tendency to add complexity and do things that destroy value.” “If you leave an organization, almost any environment unattended, and you don't provide guidance in this regard, it will tend to become more complicated. People will add parts. It could be expanding a team or adding a step to a process, or adding an entire new process. If it's a product, adding a feature to the product. New rules. It applies to almost any human endeavor.” “People tend to add pieces, they very rarely remove pieces.” “If you don't make a conscious effort to achieve simplicity, and avoid this increasing value-destroying complexity, that's how we got to our modern society with all the bureaucracy and complicated regulation.” “We have this principle whereby we ask everyone who works here, every time someone is suggesting that we should be adding complexity, the burden of proof is on those making that suggestion. The people who support the thesis that we shouldn't be adding complexity don't need to prove it. They just have to raise a flag and say, ‘I don't think we should.’ The burden of proof is on those who want to add complexity.” “The other part of relentless simplification is that we want people to be on the lookout for existing complexity and suggest that we should remove it.”

Over the past 6 months we've maniacally prepped our repos to be coding agent friendly. Here are some things that worked. 1. Make CI blazing fast. Use every Rust, Zig, or Go ported tool that lets agents verify their work. This means UV, oxfmt, Typescript 7. Move integration tests to post merge hooks. 2. Trigger coding agents automatically based on triage labels. A coding agent should setup a proof of concept or repro steps automatically so an engineer can pick up the issue seamlessly. 3. Setup crons for things devs hate doing. Setup agents to fill SDK gaps, skill tuning, filling in critical regression checks. 4. Give agents ways to prove their work. Add screenshotting skills, agent-browswer, cloud storage for storing assets. 5. Make it possible to hermetically deploy your app, preferably multiple at a time. If a coding agent can deploy the app locally, the faster it can work. 6. Give the agents realistic production "simulation" data. Agents will work much better when they are working against data that looks like how your users use the product.