Yeah i noticed this heavily. Working on a branch i critique and give a simpler design. Claude implements and then in a huge comments reference the outdated worse design. Zero value to that. Even having a "how to write comments" section in claude.md doesn't seem to help much with that.
The human (or other entity) judging it probably thinks it looks like a sign of thinking or reasoning, and doing a better job -- catching its own errors before they are confidently surfaced. That would be worth rewarding.
Article is seriously wrong, because it makes a huge mistake in the last part. You can't simply look at the produced tokens and that is your cost. In agentic coding there are lots of turns meaning you not only pay for the output tokens you also pay for all the input tokens sent each time (even if a lot cheaper, like 10x when cached). So this calculation does not accurately represent the api cost at all.
Second thing is you can starkly upgrade the token generation locally if you use agent teams. Single conversations are memory bandwidth bound and don't fully make use of your compute. If you can batch tokens from multiple agents you can easily 5x token generation.
No, an agent cli is no harness. You have to provide a harness for an agent by yourself, otherwise it will run free. Which is called vibe coding. Free as you wish, without any harness.
The K/V Cache is just an optimization. But yeah you would expect the attention for the model producing "Ok im doing X" and you asking "Why did you do X?" be similar. So i don't see a reason why introspection would be impossible. In fact trying to adapt a test skill where the agent would write a new test instead of adapting a new one i asked it why and it gave the reasoning it used. We then adapted the skill to specifically reject that reasoning and then it worked and the agent adapted the existing test instead.
In the example given in the article i think the correct behavior would have been to infer the type backwards from the return type of the function. Is that not why mypy actually errors here?
If you're referring to the `first_three_lines` example in strategy 3, Mypy would give the same error even if we changed the return value to something unrelated like `return ["something"]`.
