--- format: "aidr-story-markdown/v1" id: "8386a3d995ec799fd5400e1dad4236bd1eedd200aa42bfe2f3b007e69c7d11f3" canonical_url: "https://aidr.today/8386a3d9?lang=en" title: "katamari architecture" lang: "en" requested_lang: "en" available_langs: ["en","vi"] translation_fallback: null fallback_fields: [] published_at: "2026-09-24T18:20:23.000Z" category: "Research" topics: ["architecture","infra"] source_urls: ["https://nove.dev/blog/katamari-architecture/","https://lobste.rs/s/f0buwg/katamari_architecture"] summary: "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…" --- # katamari architecture > [Open the canonical story]() **Published:** 2026-09-24T18:20:23.000Z **Category:** Research **Topics:** architecture, infra ## Summary 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… ## Sources - [Story source]() - [Discussion]()