No, it sounds like the work of a product manager, you’re just working with agents rather than with developers.

I think this is better than many current coding interview methods. Assuming you have an agent setup to not give the interviewee the answer directly.

Of course there are times when you need someone extremely skilled at a particular language. But from my experience I would MUCH prefer to see how someone builds out a problem in natural language and have guarantees to its success. I’ve been in too many interviews where candidates trip over syntax, pick the wrong language, or are just not good at memorization and don’t want to look dumb looking things up. I usually prefer paired programming interviews where I cater my assistance to expectations of the position. AI can essentially do that for us.

My understanding is it's already here [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44723289

not a joke.

Also, the future you are referring to is... like... 6 weeks from now.

I have a static analysis and refactoring tool that does wonders to identify duplication and poor architecture patterns and provide a roadmap for agents to fix the issues. It's like magic, just point it at your codebase then tell the agent to grind away at the output (making sure to come up for air and rerun tests regularly) and it'll go for hours.

This is what a lot of business leaders miss.

The benefits you might gain from LLMs is that you are able to discern good output from bad.

Once that's lost, the output of these tools becomes a complete gamble.

Static and analytic guardrails ??

Unless you are writing some shitty code for a random product that will be used for some demo then trashed, code can be resumed to a simple thing:

  Code is a way to move ideas into the real world through a keyboard

Tests are probably the thing you should never build randomly, you should put a lot of thoughts in them: do they make sense ? Do your code make sense ? With tests, you are forced to use your own code, sometimes as your users will

Writing tests is a good way to force yourself to be empathic with your users

People that are coding through IA are the equivalent of the pre-2015 area system administrators that renewed TLS certificates manually. They are people that can (and are replacing themselves) with bash scripts. I don't miss them and I won't miss this new kind.

> You should rarely have to look at the code, it should be a significant escalation event

This is the bit I am having problems with: if you are rarely looking at the code, you will never have the skills to actually debug that significant escalation event.

good fucking luck writing adequate test suites for qualitative business logic

if it's even possible it will be more work than writing the code manually

What do you mean you can spot errors much quicker?

By synchronously working on 1 do you mean coding it with minimal AI?

Nice article by the way. I've found my workflow to be pretty much exactly the same using Claude code.