alt Hacker NewsI wrote something similar recently about how agent-generated code lacks the institutional memory that human-written code has. There's nobody to ask why a decision was made (1).
“Specsmaxxing” is basically the right response to this. When you can't rely on authorial memory, you have to put the intent somewhere durable. Specs become the source of truth by default if we continue down the road of AI generated code.
1: https://ossature.dev/blog/ai-generated-code-has-no-author/
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I had a similar experience refactoring a large codebase• The only thing that made it possible was that each commit message had a JIRA ticket number tying it to a requirement or task. I could find the people behind the business logic and ask them about it.
the recursive-mode workflow has full traceability, including why decisions were made, what the original requirement was, what the previous state was, etc. https://recursive-mode.dev/introduction
I've been attaching to my commit messages a Git Trailer [1] of the Session UUID from the Claude Code conversation that created that commit.
It allows Claude to look back into the session where a change was made and see the decisions made, tradeoffs discussed and other history not captured by code, tests.
[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-interpret-trailers