Last year, we set to answer the question “If AI can write code 100x faster, then why aren’t you shipping 100x faster?” What we learned shocked us — even fairly nontechnical people and solo founders told us they were spending more than half of their development time reading the AI-written code. And much of the rest of the time was spent either de-slop-ping it, or wishing they had done so.
As luck turns out, our last two products were a tool that quickly onboards people to large codebases ( https://x.com/0xjimmyk/status/1873357324229984677 ) and trainings that taught deep concepts of code quality to CEOs, YC founders, and engineers at top companies ( mirdin.com ), so we were extremely well-positioned to solve these problems.
Command Center is an agentic coding environment focused on quality. With a few keypresses, you can start building 3 features at once and soon have 3 diffs ready, each consisting of 2000 changed lines across 50 files….
This is normally the point where you think “Crap, what now?”
With Command Center, at this point you simply click “Refactor,” and watch the vibed slop turn into readable robustness. Then you click “Generate Walkthrough,” and then suddenly, to read a 2000 line diff, instead of scrolling up and down trying to make sense of it, you just press the right arrow key 200 times. See something you don’t like? Click on line 37, type “Do this and all other network fetches in the background Cmd+Enter,” and you have a few more agents getting your code into final shape. Click or type “Commit,” “Push,” “Create PR” — you just shipped a high quality, non-slop feature
We’re striving to be the best at every step of the pipeline, but can just try Command Center in pieces wherever you feel your current workflow is weakest. We have users who do all their coding in Zed or the Codex app, and then jump over to Command Center for a walkthrough when it finishes running. There’s even a skill that will pop open a Command Center walkthrough from the environment of your choice. Or you can just keep Command Center running while you do your work elsewhere, and if your AI deletes anything, you have Command Center’s snapshots to the rescue.
We launched quietly last year and have been refining since. The quality and usability have kept going up, and Command Center is now ready for a lot more attention.
Since our quiet launch, we’ve seen at least a dozen other agentic coding environments appear….approximately all of which have the same feature set focused on the part which is already easy (generating the first version of the code) and with at best a shoddy answer to the hard part (everything that comes after). Command Center’s focus is making the hard parts easy.
Here’s what our users have to say:
“[The refactorings] give your LLM taste. I’ve never seen an LLM write code this good before.” — Doug Slater, Staff Engineer, Climavision
“With Command Center walkthroughs, I can get through a 400-line diff in less than half the time.” — Prateek Kumar, Platfor Engineer, Sumo Logic
This product is not for everyone. If you’re someone who preaches “the prompt is the source, the code is the compiler output,” then you probably won’t enjoy Command Center.
But if you want to uphold traditional engineering discipline while also shipping 20 PRs a day, then this is the environment for you.
I guess that’s OK, but I was skateboarding at 19.
Can you even kick flip?
Doug has not signed up for it.
I can tell you that we do extensive testing, we figured out how to objectively measure the code quality on certain benchmark problems, empirically it's extremely helpful nearly all the time.
But in the general case: it is not actually possible to guarantee this.
That's because whether a change improves the code often depends on information which is literally not present in the codebase.
Some of these are more trite. E.g.: whether a comment is helpful or redundant slop depends on the audience.
Some are deeper. E.g.: whether a piece of duplication is good or bad depends on the intent, and that is often impossible to recover from the source. https://www.pathsensitive.com/2018/01/the-design-of-software...
A simpler example: There's a function that's never called. Should it be deleted?
There's a number of factors outside the codebase that determine the answer. Including the obvious one "Not if your next prompt is going to start using it."
It's pretty expensive to measure even for small programs. It's also more of a relative than an absolute measure, i.e.: it scores two variants of the same codebase, but the raw scores aren't very meaningful on their own. So our goal had been to use this in the benchmark set we're working on when we release a standalone refactoring product.
But the more I think about this suggestion, the more I think: "Hmmm, why not?"
The most difficult code in the 1.0 release is some gymnastics to avoid the appearance of a concurrency conflict with a user running their own jj commands, made at the request of the person who introduced me to jj.