katamari architecture

The article draws a comparison between poorly-directed software development LLM agents and the katamari from the video game Katamari Damacy. The katamari is a rolling orb that collects and sticks together various objects, resulting in a tangled mass. Similarly, agentic development tends towards feature addition without proper consideration of composition, aiming for the shortest path to accomplish the prompt.

This approach has many negative qualities, akin to an underpaid and short-on-time human engineer. However, the author argues that the katamari analogy does a disservice to the spirit of Katamari. While the game's spirit clod appears thrown-together and unplanned, the method by which the ball naturally forms has a level of complexity worthy of a patent.

In contrast, LLMs lack the necessary sense to determine how to properly add new features, simply sticking them on at random. Despite this, the author hopes that the term "katamari architecture" will stick around as a catchy buzzword. The article then delves into various aspects of this architecture, comparing it to the Big Ball of Mud architecture, which arises due to several driving forces such as time, cost, experience, skill, visibility, complexity, and scale.

The author believes that building a katamari from the same impulses as mudballs is possible, as LLMs are not very good at writing code compared to skilled human developers, and they are invisible, increasing the complexity of the codebase. The author also discusses the visibility problem, noting that not only are users unable to see the horrible code inside the application, but even developers are struggling to read it.

The author argues that LLMs represent the accelerationist dream realized, leading to a dystopian future where trust is obsolete, and the internet is flooded with unspeakable content. The author concludes by advocating for smaller, more maintainable software made by well-compensated and less overworked individuals, rather than a full-throttle, break-neck speed approach.