Fallbacks hide bugs: a coding philosophy for AI agents

gabriberton · x · 2026-10-13

Expanding on his shared system prompt for coding agents, developer gabriberton details his code philosophy: value robustness and minimal lines of code, avoid bloat and duplication; hate fallbacks and useless if-else branches ("elif code is broken then repair it" should not exist — fail loudly), and love asserts for catching bugs early, since fallbacks hide bugs and bloat code.

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