Nicotine has been demonstrated to help people with schizophrenia and certain mental illnesses quite a bit. It's considered a medicine by indigenous cultures for a reason.

The word you wanted there was probably monotonically

You're not wrong. The current bottleneck is validation. If you use orchestration to ship faster, you have less time to validate what you're building, and the quality goes down.

If you have a really big test suite to build against, you can do more, but we're still a ways off from dark software factories being viable. I guessed ~3 years back in mid 2025 and people thought I was crazy at the time, but I think it's a safe time frame.

Seems like if you're in that boat you'd just want to go with F# though?

Nope

This has been studied, Kotlin/C#/Elixir beat it handily.

Do have any links to back this up? I'd be really interested.

There's been an anti-MCP pro-CLI train going for a while since ~May of last year (I've been personally beating this drum since then) but I think MCP has a very real use case.

Specifically, MCP is a great unit of encapsulation. I have a secure agent framework (https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/smith-core) where I convert MCPs to microservices via sidecar and plug them into a service mesh, it makes securing agent capabilities really easy by leveraging existing policy and management tools. Then agents can just curl everything in bash rather than needing CLIs for everything. CLIs are still slightly more token efficient but overall the simplicity and the power of the scheme is a huge win.

The lines of code thing isn't because we think it's a good metric, but because we have literally no good metric and we're trying to communicate a velocity difference. If you invent a new metric that doesn't have LoC's problems while being as easy to use, you'll be a household name in software engineering in short order.

Also, AI is better at reading code than writing it, but the overhead to FIND code is real.

Prompt injection is hard but I believe tractable. I've found that by having a canary agent transform insecure input into a structured format with security checks, you can achieve good isolation and mitigation. More at https://sibylline.dev/articles/2026-02-22-schema-strict-prom...

Sandbox isolation is only slightly important, you don't need to make it fancy, just a plain old VM. The really important thing is how you control capabilities you give for the agent to act on your behalf.

But managing granular permissions is hard. The common denominator with all these discussions is people want to apply the minimal amount of thinking possible.

1) can access/write local files?

2) can access/write a specific folder?

3) can access network?

4) can access gateway/internet?

5) can access local network? (vlans would help here)

6) give access to USB devices

7) needs access to the screen? -> giveframebuffer access / drawing primitive

8) Need to write? Use an overlay FS that can be checked by the host and approved

9) sub processes can never escalate permissions

By default: nothing. But unfortunately, it’s always by default allow.

Also, make it simple to remove the permissions again.