Comment by blutoot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blutoot | Hacker News Reader

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At a scale, I don't see a net negative of AI merging "shit by itself" if the developer (or the agent) is ensuring sufficient e2e, integration and unit test coverage prior to every merge, if in return I get my team to crank out features at a 10x speed.

The reality is that probably 99.9999% of code bases on this earth (but this might drop soon, who knows) pre-date LLMs and organizing them in a way that coding agents can produce consistent results from sprint to sprint, will need a big plumbing work from all dev teams. And that will include refactoring, documentation improvements, building consensus on architectures and of course reshaping the testing landscape. So SWE's will have a lot of dirty work to do before we reach the aforementioned "scale".

However, a lot of platforms are being built from ground-up today in a post-CC (claude code) era . And they should be ready to hit that scale today.

Yup! Software engineers aren't going to be out of work anytime soon, but I'm acting more like a CTO or VPE with a team of agents now, rather than just a single dev with a smart intern.

I am not in the tech field anymore and I use exclusively free models and clis. They are mostly of Chinese origin. I call them my little software sweatshop.

I hate this paradigm because it pits me against my tools as if we're adversaries. The tools are prone to rewrite or even delete the tests, so we have to write other tools to sandbox agents from each other and check each others' work, and I just don't see a way to get deterministically good results over just building shit myself. It comes down to needing high trust in my tools to feel confident in what we're shipping.

The key is that at the end of the day productivity is king which is a polite term for cutting head count and/or delivering at a ridiculously higher velocity.

You can deterministically always get good results at your pace. But most likely, you won't achieve that at the speed and scale that a coding agent running in 4-5 worktrees, 24/7 without food or toilet breaks, especially if the latter will mostly help achieve the product/business goals at an "OK" quality (in which case you will perhaps be measured by how good you can steer these agents to elevate that quality from "OK" without sacrificing scale too much).

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