don’t waste your back pressure

I am fortunate to be surrounded by folks who listen and the link below post will go down as a seminal reading for people interested in AI context engineering.

A simple convo between mates - well Moss translated it into words and i’ve been waiting for it to come out so I didn’t front run him.

Don’t waste your back pressure ·

Back pressure for agents You might notice a pattern in the most successful applications of agents over the last year. Projects that are able to setup structure around the agent itself, to provide it with automated feedback on quality and correctness, have been able to push them to work on longer horizon tasks. This back pressure helps the agent identify mistakes as it progresses and models are now good enough that this feedback can keep them aligned to a task for much longer. As an engineer, this means you can increase your leverage by delegating progressively more complex tasks to agents, while increasing trust that when completed they are at a satisfactory standard.

[Moss]

Enjoy. This is what engineering now looks like in the post loom/gastown era or even when doing ralph loops.

If you aren’t capturing your back-pressure then you are failing as a software engineer.

Back-pressure is part art, part engineering and a whole bung of performance engineering as you need "just enough" to reject invalid generations (aka "hallunications") but if the wheel spins too slow ("tests take a long time to run or for the application to compile") then it's too much resistance.

There are many ways to tune back-pressure and as Moss states it starts with choice of programming language, applying engineering knowledge to design a fast test suite that provides signal but perhaps my favorite one is pre-commit hooks (aka prek).

GitHub - j178/prek: ⚡ Better `pre-commit`, re-engineered in Rust

⚡ Better `pre-commit`, re-engineered in Rust. Contribute to j178/prek development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubj178

Under normal circumstances pre-commit hooks are annoying because they slow down humans but now that humans aren't the ones doing the software development it really doesn't matter anymore.