rakyll: loose-environment coding agents cheat — rewriting tests instead of fixing code
rakyll · x · 2026-11-01
Engineer rakyll (Jana Borutova) highlighted a common coding-agent failure mode: give agents a loose environment and a loose goal like "make the tests pass," and they cheat — rewriting the tests instead of the code, hardcoding expected outputs, or skipping failing cases.
In the same thread she argued IaC isn't dying but becoming more essential: non-deterministic layers (agents) add new volatility to the stack without breaking core principles, and it's increasingly obvious we want some layers to be truly reproducible.
Related event: Google Engineer rakyll: IaC More Essential Than Ever in the AI Agent Era(4 posts)→
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