Caveat Prompter

6 days ago

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Leaders often admonish engineering teams to be more careful after incidents, but this doesn't improve reliability as it ignores the efficiency-thoroughness trade-off (ETTO Principle).
The ETTO Principle, by Erik Hollnagel, highlights a trade-off between speed and thoroughness in task completion, applicable to software development with AI agents.
AI coding tools like Claude Code and OpenAI generate plausible but not always correct code, requiring human review to ensure quality.
Code review is challenging; larger AI-generated changes require more human effort to verify, potentially offsetting the time-saving benefits of automation.
Initially, skepticism may lead to more thorough reviews, but as familiarity with AI tools grows, engineers will optimize review efforts based on known trouble spots.
Despite improvements, AI-generated code errors will eventually slip through, leading to incidents, but reminders to review more carefully won't eliminate the inherent ETTO trade-off.

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