Last weekend I was debugging some blocking issue on a microcontroller with embassy-rs, where the whole microcontroller would lock up as soon as I started trying to connect to an MQTT server.

I was having Opus investigate it and I kept building and deploying the firmware for testing.. then I just figured I'd explain how it could do the same and pull the logs.

Off it went, for the next ~15 minutes it would flash the firmware multiple times until it figured out the issue and fixed it.

There was something so interesting about seeing a microcontroller on the desk being flashed by Claude Code, with LEDs blinking indicating failure states. There's something about it not being just code on your laptop that felt so interesting to me.

But I agree, absolutely, red/green test or have a way of validating (linting, testing, whatever it is) and explain the end-to-end loop, then the agent is able to work much faster without being blocked by you multiple times along the way.

This is kind of why I'm not really scared of losing my job.

While Claude is amazing at writing code, it still requires human operators. And even experienced human operators are bad at operating this machinery.

Tell your average joe - the one who thinks they can create software without engineers - what "tools-in-a-loop" means, and they'll make the same face they made when you tried explaining iterators to them, before LLMs.

Explain to them how typing system, E2E or integration test helps the agent, and suddenly, they now have to learn all the things they would be required to learn to be able to write on their own.

Jules is slow incompetent shit and that uses tools in a loop, so no...