Comment by chrismorgan

My view is that readability and ease of understanding have a real impact on auditability. Nondeterministic output also clearly has a significant impact on auditability.

The balance between readability and determinism for auditability partly relates to developer philosophy. Tech is famous for religious arguments. I have friends who hate AI coding, and want to avoid nondeterminstic tools at all costs. And other friends whose productivity has increased significantly, and who see the future of programming as natural language.

The quality of AI models and tools like Claude Code is improving fast, and there are many developers who find value in them, myself included. I built this to make life easier for developers who want to use AI tools for automation.

I find it much faster to parse and understand plain language than many code scripts I've seen. It was one of Python's great insights that people spend more time reading code than writing it. And there is a tradeoff in auditability between determinism and the ability to quickly read and understand what systems do.

There are clearly many people who find AI useful, and who are becoming skilled in its use as a tool. This is just a little tool that I put together for myself and other people who fall in that basket.

Learning where to use AI tools appropriately - how to constrain the dangers while maximizing the value - is part of the challenge. From using this particular tool for real work, it fits some use cases well, and can make things easier both to understand and share, as well as to write.

I hope it's useful for some other people wanting to use AI for scripting and automation.

I think that quickly understandable instructions are part of auditability. Not the whole thing, and their use needs to be balanced with safety and security. But an important part of it.

I accept there are plenty of folks who don't see AI tools that way. We're sharing this for people who see the value in this new approach, even though it is a fast-moving field and there are a lot of imperfections.

Any reasonably competent Claude Code user who is careful about setting permissions boundaries is no more going to delete their hard drive than a competent command line user would. There will be things that go wrong with AI, as before it.

In years of tech support, I've personally had to help people who neutered their Windows install or deleted files they needed. Those things happen and I'd argue they come down to skill issues, with AI or without. New tools have a learning curve.

I get that you think that's bizarre to see readability with AI-based tools as more auditable, and I really do understand that perspective.

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