Fowler asks whether the agentic loop needs a TDD-style refactor step, so a team consolidates its own understanding of what an LLM just built rather than accumulating "cognitive debt" it never checks. Six months old, and the sharpest overheard lines in the post are Chatham-House-Rule unattributed even though the surrounding argument is Fowler's own.
In the News: August 9, 2026
A first-party eval tool from Prime Radiant and Simon Willison lets practitioners test cheap models against their own tasks as frontier prices climb.
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A small eval framework lets a coding agent build its own tests
Prime Radiant built smevals to answer a narrower question than most benchmarks ask: not "which model is best," but "which cheap model is good enough for this specific task." The post opens with the pricing case for asking that question at…
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engineer away the slop
ghuntley.com, July 24, 2026 · Huntley (popularizer of the "Ralph" agent loop) is joining a deterministic-simulation and formal-verification company, and argues verification, not creation, is the discipline software factories are short on. A four-point hypothesis and a career move, not a worked example, and it restates a case this corpus has already made at length (Files 119, 129, 202, 206, 263, 271) rather than adding a new mechanism.