Show HN: Sphinx – A hook that quizzes you on your AI's code before shipping(sphinx-six-theta.vercel.app) FOSS, Basically it plugs into your existing coding agent workflow and every time you push to prod it'll throw up a questionnaire that checks if you understand how the code you're pushing works. |
Not sure if this is the right solution, but I would like to learn/understand/grow more as I pursue reckless efficiency.
There was an excellent post here on HN that unfortunately went unnoticed. I highly recommend reading it as it exactly points out this problem: understanding.
Here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50128468
Now, people are building tools that not only hide the solutions to these problems in some obscure coding tool, markdown file, or agent harness, but they build gates that help developers to elevate themselves from the darkness of not knowing better. The number of developers roughly doubles every ~3 years, so at any given time, half of the people building software have less than 3 years of experience. Most of them didn’t even study CS before starting their careers. Tools like this will be the new warning voice that told people like us 5 to 10 years ago to never copy code from stackoverflow that you didn’t understand. It’s great.
Not necessarily. I use SOTA models with established stacks like .NET which allow my agent to easily follow decades of best practiced patterns (DI, EF Core, ASP.NET Core...) so you still and up with proper architecture.
In fact I can easily still manually inspect everything bc I already know how it's supposed to be written.
It is absolutely batsh*t crazy insane what SWE has come to in the last cple years.
And yet part of me is loving it.
Edit: I see there are a lot of people questioning the value of this. The thing is that there are teams where people are just pumping tons of AI code without understanding their work (literally take the ticket and dump it) and shipping it. culture change is the right answer but v hard but this at least slows things down and is quick to implement
The first is when I care about the code. That's when I actually read what it produces and force it to use my mental model of how things should be.
The second is when I just need a solution that sorta fits the requirements provided. Then I don't read the code because I really do not care.
So this hook would either ask me things I know, or it would ask me things I do not care about.
But I guess this is very workflow-dependent.
however, it still feels like a lot of work. what if AI hallucinates during the check?
Sun Tzu said: If your people (AI agents) repeatedly fail to follow instructions, examine the clarity of your orders and the effectiveness of your leadership before blaming them.
So, who is this for?
I'm sorry, what?
Your slop generator should check if a name exist before claiming it.