Hacker News Reader

Comment by virgilp | Hacker News Reader

For example, we don't have a clear analogue for "triage nurse". What would be it? Oncall engineer for production issues; "product owner" maybe for the regular tickets?

Thing is, software engineering is still (relatively) young. And more of a craft than true engineering. So the "good practices" are _somewhat established_, but at the same time, not quite. Like, we have glimpses into what works and what doesn't, but not a universally-established workflow to follow. And AI is upending what we already knew; it's really not surprising that people are looking elsewhere for workable metaphors.

View on HN

> For example, we don't have a clear analogue for "triage nurse". What would be it?

Triage nurse seems well defined in software engineering, perhaps just without a single title. There are certainly engineers that focus on triaging GitHub issues and then fixing immediate showstopper bugs and/or prioritizing the issue for further attention from other engineers.

That role can be communicated to agents by writing down that description. The risk with saying that the role is “triage nurse” is that you can’t be sure what other roles and allowances the agent will infer it has.

I think that’s the real tradeoff. The metaphor brings in behavior we never wrote down, which is both a part of why it works as well as a risk. One reviewer agent declined to send a PR back over a docstring nit “while the patient is exhausted.” It was a fair call, but there's no explicit instructions in any of the prompts/skills that said to do that.

We contain it by keeping the persona to a few sentences and writing the rest as explicit scripts or workflows. The rules that really have to hold aren’t left to the role. Human merge approval is a script checking for a real GitHub approval on the PR. A CI failure or a merge conflict bounces the PR before a reviewer agent is even launched. So the metaphor shapes judgment calls, and the hard rules about what should or shouldn't happen are in code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com