I know it’s a minor point, but it bugs me every time this form pops up…
Captive (noun): a person or animal whose ability to move or act freely is limited by being kept in a space; a prisoner, especially a person held by the enemy during a war.
D3fc maintainer here. A few years back we added WebGL support to D3fc (a component library for people building their own charts with D3), allowing it to render 1m+ datapoints:
An important point here is that it isnt doing a 1-shot implementation, it is iteratively solving a problem over multiple iterations, with a closed feedback loop.
Create the right agentic feedback loop and a reasoning model can perform far better through iteration than its first 1-shot attempt.
This is very human. How much code can you reliable write without any feedback? Very little. We iterate, guided by feedback (compiler, linter, executing and exploring)
The flow was, me finding interesting pattern -> Claude ingesting the reference and putting it in a template -> Me figuring out if it makes sense -> push
Nolan shares some interesting reflections at the end of this post. Here are a few direct quotes:
> "I’m somewhat horrified by how easily this tool can reproduce what took me 20-odd years to learn"
> "I’ve decided that my role is not to try to resist the overwhelming onslaught of this technology, but instead to just witness and document how it’s shaking up my worldview and my corner of the industry"
> "I have no idea what coding will look like next year (2026), but I know how my wife will be planning our next vacation."
It’s still around, and tends to be adopted by big enterprises. It’s generally a decent product, but is facing a lot of equally powerful competition and is very expensive.
“When an LLM can generate a working high-quality implementation in a single try, that is called one-shotting. This is the most efficient form of LLM programming.”
This is a good article, but misses one of the most important advances this year - the agentic loop.
There are always going to be limits to how much code a model can one-shot. Give it the ability to verify its changes and iterate, massively increase its ability to write sizeable chunks of verified and working code.
Dedication, mmm, dedication. Dedication, that’s what you need. If you want to be the best, and if you want to beat the rest. Dedication way you need.
Hopefully that means something to Brits of a certain age ;-)
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