the padded cell

#kent-beck

12 August, 2025

Anthropic on prompting for agents

…and musing on genies possibly teaching empathy

Anthropic has released some recordings from their Code w/ Claude event in May and the Prompting for Agents presentation’s “key principles” are basically to empathise with your agent, imagine it’s a brilliant new grad, book smart but missing all things practical at their first job: You need clear concepts, unambiguous instructions, and well-named and designed tools.

I’m more than a little amused that we’re basically coming to a point where, if things pan out with the genies, then the best wranglers will be the ones that can empathise the most with others. Then again, I always thought the brilliant asshole was the exception, they only survive if they’re in charge or are legacy to the company. And sitting in on the review meetings at work… it’s definitely the ones that help the team that we like the most, even if we sometimes need to push them to have their name on something so people don’t overlook them.

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24 July, 2025

Your name is still on it

learning to ride the AI motorcycle without crashing

A colleague recently said something that’s been rattling around in my head: “AI gives you speed, but it doesn’t give you direction.” And the more I use these tools, the more I think that undersells the danger.

I have been wondering how to think about AIs (or genies) and how computers are like bicycles for the mind, as Steve Jobs put it, and I think these tools take it further. They are more like motorcycles for the mind. They go really fast, and you better not treat them like a bike, because you need to know what you’re doing. How to handle that thing. You need to make sure you don’t try to go too fast too soon, or for too long, because you’ll get speed blind and… things will happen.

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12 July, 2025

Which hat are you wearing?

...you wouldn't wear a beanie to the beach

I was in an incident review recently where one of the problems was a human going too fast. This process is very manual, repetitive, and boring, and it rarely fails, so we skip some steps. That mostly works (see Why Do Things Go right?), except when it doesn’t. Ripe for occasional issues and likely in need of automation.

I believe we often skip steps because we don’t know why we do them. It’s not tedious for tediousness sake, it’s often there because it’s important. And until we have the automation, or maybe we’ve intentionally chosen not to automate it, we need to find some way of helping the human ’live the situation.'

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