Agents hand you five working versions. How do you pick the one that ships?
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Any coding agent gives you a working version of a feature in minutes. Ask again and you get another one, also working, slightly different. Working stopped being the filter.
My rule is simple: I ship the version with the fewest moving parts, because I'm the one debugging it at 2am. Speed of writing means nothing against speed of fixing.
What's your filter? Curious if anyone has a better rule than simplest one wins
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One thing I have noticed, agents optimize for completing the task, humans optimize for owning the consequences. The winning version is usually the one that respects the second part.
Great rule. I’d add one more strict filter to the 'simplest wins' approach: zero unnecessary dependencies. Often, an agent will give you a working version that quietly introduces a new package or deviates from the framework's native tools just to get the job done quickly. I always pick the version that strictly adheres to our core stack and doesn't bloat the architecture. Speed of fixing > speed of writing, 100%.
I think "the one that works" stopped being the filter a while ago.
Multiple implementations can produce the same output, but differ significantly in latency, cost, observability, security, maintainability and failure modes. Correctness is necessary, but the process matters just as much as the result, especially in production.
Simplicity is one of the constraints, not the objective. The best solution is the simplest one that still meets the system's requirements.