Redis array type: short story of a long development - <antirez>

I love that antirez (author of Redis) is sharing so much about is use of agentic coding. We need more stories from experts like this that provide mission-critical software. Also, software written in difficult environments like C!

Thanks to AI, the specification evolved a lot, via back and forth of feedback, intellectual challenges about what was the best design, what was the right compromise, what was too engineered and what not.

The iterations at the specification level have to be a huge unlock. For an expert to be able to explore different approaches in rapid succession allows you to innovate much faster.

You know what was the biggest realization of all that? For high quality system programming tasks you have to still be fully involved, but I ventured to a level of complexity that I would have otherwise skipped. AI provided the safety net for two things: certain massive tasks that are very tiring (like the 32 bit support that was added and tested later), and at the same time the virtual work force required to make sure there are no obvious bugs in complicated algorithms. To write the initial huge specification was the key to the successive work, as it was the key to review each single line of sparsearray.c and t_array.c and modifying everything was not a good fit.

He took a bigger bet, went for a bigger slice of functionality, and had a bigger outcome by using agentic coding tools.