Show HN: Command Center, the AI coding env for people who care about quality (cc.dev)

69 points by Darmani ↗ HN
Hi HN! We’re Jimmy and Ray. Jimmy is a Thiel Fellow with a Ph. D. from MIT who has worked on programming tools for 15 years; Ray became VP of Sales at a $2B company when he was 19 and has built side-businesses vibe-coding.

Last year, we set to answer the question “If AI can write code 100x faster, then why aren’t you shipping 100x faster?” What we learned shocked us — even fairly nontechnical people and solo founders told us they were spending more than half of their development time reading the AI-written code. And much of the rest of the time was spent either de-slop-ping it, or wishing they had done so.

As luck turns out, our last two products were a tool that quickly onboards people to large codebases ( https://x.com/0xjimmyk/status/1873357324229984677 ) and trainings that taught deep concepts of code quality to CEOs, YC founders, and engineers at top companies ( mirdin.com ), so we were extremely well-positioned to solve these problems.

Command Center is an agentic coding environment focused on quality. With a few keypresses, you can start building 3 features at once and soon have 3 diffs ready, each consisting of 2000 changed lines across 50 files….

This is normally the point where you think “Crap, what now?”

With Command Center, at this point you simply click “Refactor,” and watch the vibed slop turn into readable robustness. Then you click “Generate Walkthrough,” and then suddenly, to read a 2000 line diff, instead of scrolling up and down trying to make sense of it, you just press the right arrow key 200 times. See something you don’t like? Click on line 37, type “Do this and all other network fetches in the background Cmd+Enter,” and you have a few more agents getting your code into final shape. Click or type “Commit,” “Push,” “Create PR” — you just shipped a high quality, non-slop feature

We’re striving to be the best at every step of the pipeline, but can just try Command Center in pieces wherever you feel your current workflow is weakest. We have users who do all their coding in Zed or the Codex app, and then jump over to Command Center for a walkthrough when it finishes running. There’s even a skill that will pop open a Command Center walkthrough from the environment of your choice. Or you can just keep Command Center running while you do your work elsewhere, and if your AI deletes anything, you have Command Center’s snapshots to the rescue.

We launched quietly last year and have been refining since. The quality and usability have kept going up, and Command Center is now ready for a lot more attention.

Since our quiet launch, we’ve seen at least a dozen other agentic coding environments appear….approximately all of which have the same feature set focused on the part which is already easy (generating the first version of the code) and with at best a shoddy answer to the hard part (everything that comes after). Command Center’s focus is making the hard parts easy.

Here’s what our users have to say:

“[The refactorings] give your LLM taste. I’ve never seen an LLM write code this good before.” — Doug Slater, Staff Engineer, Climavision

“With Command Center walkthroughs, I can get through a 400-line diff in less than half the time.” — Prateek Kumar, Platfor Engineer, Sumo Logic

This product is not for everyone. If you’re someone who preaches “the prompt is the source, the code is the compiler output,” then you probably won’t enjoy Command Center.

But if you want to uphold traditional engineering discipline while also shipping 20 PRs a day, then this is the environment for you.

24 comments

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How do you guys ensure that the refactoring improves the existing code?
I'm Doug, quoted above. I took Jimmy's excellent course, and when I learned about Command Center, I subbed immediately. I wasn't disappointed. It's a bit like turning your LLM into a graduate of that course.
Oh hey, this is the jj workshop person!
Code walkthroughs are underrated
Command Center is really cool. I worked with Jimmy at Thiel Fellowship - wicked smart guy.
“Ray became VP of Sales at a $2B company when he was 19”

I guess that’s OK, but I was skateboarding at 19.

Can you even kick flip?

How can I have any confidence in the security of your product?

It's extremely hard to convince myself to use a product for the huge variety of often sensitive agent tasks when it's not open source. I understand the business reasons for that, but it's unusual in this space at the moment.

Instead: Can you post any independent security assessments perhaps? Fundamental things like SOC2?

It's interesting how AI is making software development dramatically faster, but quality is becoming an even bigger differentiator. Building is no longer the bottleneck for many founders. Knowing what to build and maintaining quality are becoming more important.
Somewhat ironic that the site is completely broken on mobile, the text doesn’t render until you scroll near past it. Production code eh?
"even fairly nontechnical people and solo founders told us they were spending more than half of their development time reading the AI-written code.." ~ Is this even true? I haven't read code for at least 6 months and I have many who are in the same boat.
Header layout breaks on ipad. haha...
> But if you want to uphold traditional engineering discipline while also shipping 20 PRs a day, then this is the environment for you.

It seems like an interesting tool, curious about trying it out once it's been out for a while. But who in holy hell, with AI assistance or not, could possibly "ship" (merged?) 20 PRs a day and still know what they're doing?

You talk a lot about quality and making sure to avoid slop, but there is no way in heaven you can ship 20 PRs and still ship quality design/architecture/code and avoiding slop.

I'd be curious to see some of those PRs if you're saying you've essentially solved the holy paradox of "ship fast = shit code" or "ship slow = good code".

Seems like an interesting idea, any tips for how a junior dev can get the most out of using the app with the goal of programming skills growth?
There's a few obvious suggestions -- discuss design tradeoffs with the AI extensively, make sure you understand all your code, and understand the refactorings.

I think using Command Center can lead to much better skills growth than any other agentic coding environment. Which is a lot like saying that a shrubbery is much taller than grass, when you need your skills to grow into a tree.

This is a problem that no-one has solved. I think we might have it solved by the end of the year (we've been doing deals with a lot of universities and are being pulled in that direction),

The things humans can offer over AIs: product sense, greater context, taste. Of these, taste (really: software architecture and design) is the one that's most fundamentally about software engineering skill. I wrote recently about this at https://self-service.mirdin.com/software-design-in-the-age-o...

The big problem: it's very hard to develop enough taste to be a general without actually being in the trenches. This goes for pretty much any field, including literal war.

I've trained about 500 software engineers. But all of them were working professionals, who would take the training back on the job each week and see all the lessons playing out in their own and their coworker's code. If they were just chatting with AI and never having to get halfway through a big feature only to realize that the design was just fundamentally flawed, rate of growth would probably be much slower.

In short: lots you can do to grow faster than someone who just stares at the Claude CLI all day and never opens an editor. But how to become actually good while still doing AI coding? Unsolved problem.

I do think this style of working is where software engineering work is heading. This style is essentially exactly what my workflow is today using _insert agent harness here_ + plannotator[0]. Linear also recently rolled out something very similar for reviews[1]. The working style of spec driven dev, following by fast code reviews using tools like plannotator/linear/command center seems to be where we are headed, and more more tools like it are popping up nowadays.

0: https://plannotator.ai/

1: https://linear.app/docs/diffs

plannotator's made me actually want to read my agents' plans. Great product. I've been liking the review as well.
love to see jj support, but if I cant use my subs, it's a deal-breaker for me.