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Comment by fasterik | Hacker News Reader

You can work the way you want to work. In my experience, letting the agent make every decision leads to a big ball of mud that requires touching dozens of files to make a change. More context is needed, it burns through tokens much faster, and the agent takes shortcuts and builds technical debt. So the way I prefer to work is to have changes targeted to a single file or small set of files where I've defined the API. Maybe that will change in the future, I'm not set in stone here.

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> In my experience, letting the agent make every decision leads to a big ball of mud that requires touching dozens of files to make a change

It seems too early to make any conclusion like that. We've still only been doing agentic coding for a year and capability significantly improved during that time. I don't think anybody on either side of this debate can have actual empirical evidence to support conclusions about where it lands longer term.

The main argument I see is that it probably pays to be slightly conservative because the cost of being wrong by maintaining too much oversight and shipping slightly less code is better than the cost of ending up with an entirely unmaintainable system. In some cases it will be more than "slightly less" but in almost all complex pre-existing systems, you are rate limited by a lot of other factors outside of code production, so the effective difference just isn't that high.

At agentic coding velocity, tech debt becomes obvious much more quickly. Empirical evidence is a bit of a ridiculous bar to hold for software development - we are as quantitatively blind now as we have ever been - but at least for me the anecdotal evidence is very clear. Today's agents hill-climb and their software architecture is pretty reliably bad without a human in the loop.

And it's debatable how much better they will get quickly. Verifiable rewards for maintainability of software is, I think, possible but very hard.

When I said "in my experience" I meant literally that, my experience so far. I'm not making any predictions. I'm definitely anticipating things improving at a rapid pace, which is why I think it's good to run frequent experiments. If in a month I find that an agent can one-shot a 20k line project without creating an unreadable, unmaintainable mess, that will be great.

I share that experience. To the point that I don't think I'd want to work (at least for as long as I have the luxury of having a choice) on a project where an AI has been let loose.

I also see devs, seniors as well, that have a different experience. At least that's what they say. I stay open to the possibility that I'm doing or seeing it 'wrong', but I'm far from convinced. I do like to experiment like you wrote in a later comment, things may change, and even now I do find it can be very powerful, for the right tasks.

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