| ▲ | kypro 2 days ago | |
Are you saying this from experience? We have a large monorepo at my company. You're right that for adding entirely new core concepts to an existing codebase we wouldn't give an AI some vague requirements and ask it to build something – but we wouldn't do that for a human engineer either. Typically we would discuss as a team and then once we've agreed on technologies and an approach someone will implement it relying heavily on AI to write the actual code (because it's faster and generally won't add dumb bugs like typos or conditional logic error). Almost everything else at this point can be done by AI. Some stuff requires a little support from human engineers, but honestly our main bottlenecks at this point is just QA and getting the infra to a place where we can rapidly ship stuff into production. > You need to know what's happening and you can't ship straight AI code. I think there is some truth to this. We are struggling to maintain a high-level understanding of the code as a team right now, not because there is no human that understands, but because 5 years ago our team would have probably been 10-20x larger given the amount we're shipping. So when one engineer leaves the company or goes on holiday we find we lose significantly more context of systems than you historically would with larger teams of engineers. Previously you might have had 2-3 engineers who had a deep understanding of a single system. Now we have maybe 1-2 engineers who need to maintain understanding of 5-6 systems. That said, AI helps a lot with this. Asking AI to explain code and help me learn how it works means I can pick up new systems significantly quicker. | ||
| ▲ | rdos 2 days ago | parent [-] | |
> Are you saying this from experience? Yes. I mostly work on Quarkus microservices and use cursor with auto agent mode. > we wouldn't give an AI some vague requirements and ask it to build something > we would discuss as a team seems like a reasonable workflow. It's the polar opposite of what was written in the blog post. That is the usual, easy way people use agents and what I think is the wrong path. May I also ask what language and/or framework you work with where so much context works good enough? > Asking AI to explain code and help me learn how it works means I can pick up new systems significantly quicker. Summarization is generaly a great task for LLMs | ||