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Comment by Eridrus | original | Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents like a medical team
[−]Eridrus · 2026-10-11 Sun 00:00 UTC · link
Did you do any ablation studies on what is actually useful vs what happens to just work because these systems can work around whatever people do?

I compare this to OpenAI's symphony prompt which, at a high level, does exactly the same thing outlined here except model selection and doesn't really have the need for roles or hospital metaphors.

[−]ajstorm · 2026-10-11 Sun 01:08 UTC · link
No, we haven't performed any ablation studies yet - it's a good suggestion.

The comparison with OpenAI's Symphony is valid (the two systems do broadly the same thing). One thing that's different about Sinai is that it keeps the code author and reviewer in separate agents with separate context. At the time we built it, we suspected that this would lead to better outcomes, but again, we haven't validated that it does.

I confess that there's a lot more validation we could do with this model but we just haven't found the time. One thing we don't cover in the post is that this is a side project for both of us, so we have less time than we'd like to perform experimentation and validation.

[−]ArtRichards · 2026-10-11 Sun 08:39 UTC · link
Yes agreed, using a system very similar without the hospital vibe :)