katamari architecture

User marginalia [1] on lobste.rs compared the output of poorly-directed software development LLM agents to the "katamari" from Katamari Damacy : a video game in which you roll a clump of miscellaneous objects around, sticking everything you can find to the outside. It's an apt comparison; agentic development tends towards feature addition without attention to composition - they take the shortest path to accomplish the prompt. It has all the worst qualities of an underpaid and short-on-time human engineer. However, I think the analogy does a disservice to Katamari ! The spirit clod is carefully crafted (algorithmically, sure, but the algorithm was carefully crafted) to appear thrown-together and unplanned, but the method by which they made the ball naturally round has enough complexity that they thought it warranted a patent . By contrast, LLMs don't have the sense required to determine how to properly add whatever new feature their prompter desires, it's just stuck on at random (modulo a probability distribution). Despite that, katamari architecture is a catchy-enough buzzword that I hope it "sticks" around! Katamari architecture is here, but it's not a hopeless problem. Let's see if we can learn from prior work.