| ▲ | operatingthetan 15 hours ago |
| >This is going to blow up. We are way past wringing our hands over agentic engineering. Every startup and all fast moving companies are onboard. They don't hand code anymore. There will not be some code quality crisis that will stop everyone in their tracks. I'm trying to cope with this too, but I don't think the best path is praying for failure. |
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| ▲ | kace91 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Just out of the popularity of the claim, I’ll bite. Both big tech and startups are now full of people working at 10x, features are written as fast as PMs can think them, monoliths self heal with agents buzzing over them. 10x means 10 times the outcomes in a given amount of time, so did you see the last iOS version pack a decade worth of features in a single release? Do you remember when meta moved their backend to rust in a month? What about Microsoft software not having a single bug in a year? Yeah, me neither. |
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| ▲ | operatingthetan 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I didn't say anything about increased productivity or 10x. Feel free to revise your strawman. | | |
| ▲ | kace91 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Fair, let’s revise it then. If not productivity, what’s the result AI is getting that is disruptive enough to make our previous work obsolete? | | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | At 11 this morning, I wanted to both debug an issue and take a meeting before lunch. Before AI, I would have had to just start debugging after lunch, there wouldn't have been enough time to do both. But now I had Claude debug the issue concurrently with the meeting. Its answer didn't actually make sense (I still do think I'm smarter than Claude, although the gap is narrowing!), but it showed enough of its work that I could make a good guess about what was really going on, and when I asked it to check my hypothesis I got back from lunch with some debug logs that confirmed I'd found the bug. | | |
| ▲ | kace91 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | I can easily believe that, I agree Claude has applications. I am disputing the idea that this is enough of a game changer to make us mourn our now lost craft. Also, I’m mentioning that we’ve discovered a world of footguns dressed as shortcuts, which we’re not taking proper care of. First, your experience was required for that story to have a happy ending. Second, we both know someone else could probably have gone with Claude’s senseless hypothesis, asked for a fix and sent it for review. This last part is becoming pretty universal. |
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| ▲ | afavour 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If there’s no increased productivity then what’s the point in spending all the money? | | |
| ▲ | operatingthetan 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I didn't say there was or there wasn't. They just don't get to infer that I did and then attack that as my position. | | |
| ▲ | sifar 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | What is your position? Genuinely asking as someone who is similarly trying to cope and doesn't want to travel down the road being trampled on. Primarily because it doesn't make me better, it doesn't benefit me as an individual and takes the joy out from understanding things. |
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| ▲ | 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | jorl17 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 10x is definitely possible at a startup level. I suppose not in a big tech world (seems obvious to me, and it's not like development speed was the bottleneck there either, right?) You can choose not to believe what I say (and I genuinely understand if you do), and I can simply keep on doing it. I'm not taking it out of thin air either. tuesday I did in 8h the work I scheduled for roughly 65h. Ok, so maybe it's not 10x, maybe it's 8x, same ball park. And that's only talking about development. If I now get into other aspects....I have just spent the last 1.5 hours creating an incredibly detailed backcatalog of tasks and epics. This is the most detailed I have ever done so in my life and it has been working very well. It's like we merged the good of highly-detailed waterfall with the speed of agile. Tee-hee: Watergile. (I'm sure some expert in the field will let me know I have coined a new term for something that very much has a name; excuse my ignorance in advance). Nonetheless, I did this all by talking to the computer which is interfacing with my project management tools, the project documentation, and the project code. Full context on everything. In the past, I would have taken 3 or 4 days to create the same amount of tasks with a vaguely similar amount of detail. But, in truth, I wouldn't have spent so much time putting this love into the craft (!!) of planning a project, because it would exhaust me and feel like a waste of time. Don't get me wrong, I totally see shit code being thrown everywhere by inferior AI models or people who can't tame the beasts, but the right people in my life are _clearly_ building out more, better tested code, and actually built with more care. Maybe it's not at the line-by-line level, but it certainly is from the end-product result (thinking of the actual end-user). I accept your mileage may vary -- this is my very personal experience. Maybe it'll stop happening, who knows. Maybe price will be prohibitive, or maybe we'll have such an avalanche of ideas that weren't worth building that everyone will be overwhelmed and take a step back. Or maybe we won't develop juniors into the seniors of tomorrow. Or maybe everything will indeed implode once products are large enough that the original development speed can't be maintained anymore and expectations are mismatched. What I do know is that it is definitely happening in my world, and I haven't had this much fun since I was a little kid learning to code. | | |
| ▲ | the__alchemist 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you have testable hypothesis for how the 10x will manifest? I.e., is there a way we could (coarsely) measure this in a year or two from now? | | |
| ▲ | jorl17 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's a very good question. Some metrics I'm watching or considering watching right now: - Amount of leads we're taking in (per unit of time) - Sprint velocity changes (task complexity should stay roughly the same with AI, and team velocity increase — we've been seeing this happening) - Hire rates (more sales people, less developers?) - Number of projects per unit of time (of similar dimension, hard to measure) - Length of "bugfixing buffer" before big releases (we've actually been noticing this go down) - Another way of saying it is: number of bugs, or bugs per feature - Drift between planned execution time and actual execution time (we've been delivering early...but I guess we'll soon adjust our estimates...or maybe not, who knows?) - Spend on AI models - I can't measure this, but I can sort of "feel it": but the overall feedback we get from clients, the feeling we get from them. - Number of tests (tests have skyrocketed. Can't be sure about the quality, but, hey, it's a metric) - Feature turnaround time (how long since "feature is proposed" until it's actually implemented) - documentation to code ratio (not sure what we'll make of it, but there's a somewhat worrying trend here) - team balance: is everyone slowly becoming fullstack? Do we feel that those who aren't are significantly affecting development speed? if so, that indicates that the other ones are somehow moving faster I can't really think of any others, but I'm sure they exist. | |
| ▲ | AnimalMuppet 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The future will not be evenly distributed. You can't expect to see it in the productivity of the industry as a whole, or even the productivity of a large company. You might be able to see it in a medium-sized team if you measure carefully. | | |
| ▲ | jorl17 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think I agree with you. I didn't mean to imply that big corps will build faster (or more) -- in fact I said I don't expect them to right now, and I'm not so sure that will change. What I believe is that early prototype development and pivoting is insanely fast now. And if you find excellent engineers who are also great product people, and then pair them with people who have truly great ideas, many wonderful new products will emerge. | |
| ▲ | the__alchemist 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | So, it sounds like measuring directly in individual individuals or companies might be tough. (Unless the company is medium-sized?) Maybe we could look for broader trends in the economy and beyond. What sorts of companies will this manifest in? I.e. mostly "tech" companies, or beyond? |
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| ▲ | autoexec 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I don't think the best path is praying for failure. Embrace it "Embrace failure" is exactly the attitude every company is going to take. They've already been working at bottoming out our expectations. We should have been running companies out of business with regulations and abandonment when their human-written software leaked our private data to criminals, or when their untested forced-updates shut down our systems and sent our IT teams scrambling, or when their unoptimized code forced us to upgrade our hardware or negated any performance gains we should have seen from investing in upgrades. The quality, reliability, and security of the software we all use and depend on is going to nosedive, and companies already know they can get away with it. They aren't going to start caring about how we feel about that now. "Pay more and settle for less" is where we are today. "Embrace Failure" is the future we're sprinting towards. |
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| ▲ | Roguelazer 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's absolutely not true. The places that have embraced "agentic engineering" are mostly garbage factories, and lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. I recognize that most of the people on this site are just trying to self-promote for their own gig, but the level of misinformation is sometimes just staggering. |
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| ▲ | burningChrome 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Want something to be terrified of? I work at a massive health care company. They're 100% on the AI bandwagon and are putting AI everywhere they can. Billing, Software, DevOps, everywhere. If you think you can give an Agent some information and have go to work for some user, its 100% on the table for the company to do and either a) then outsource the rest offshore or b) lay the person off or shrink the department to increase the bottom line. Your healthcare, right now, is being offloaded to AI agents and bots and this is only the beginning. | | |
| ▲ | lp0_on_fire 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | I literally just sat through the annual “choose your healthcare” plan bullshit and the “meeting” was literally one of the Hr people pulling up a power point narrated by “AI”. You could tell in the first ten seconds. You’d think our plans would be cheaper given they’re offloading all this work to agents they don’t have to pay a salary to…right? |
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| ▲ | operatingthetan 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. Provide some examples then? Everyone who is all in on agentic code are pretty vocal about it. Who is declaring the opposite stance? Anyone? | | |
| ▲ | VoidWarranty 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | Both claims are hyperbole. Reality remains in the middle, but there are plenty of examples of either extreme right now. |
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| ▲ | k32k 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Indeed, I feel this place has gone insane. There's no balance here. You've got boosters and then you've got people who are panicking/fighting against anything pro-AI. | |
| ▲ | sothatsit 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is not just startups or small companies embracing agentic engineering… Stripe published blog posts about their autonomous coding agents. Amazon is blowing up production because they gave their agents access to prod. Google and Microsoft develop their own agentic engineering tools. It’s not just tech companies either, massive companies are frequently announcing their partnerships with OpenAI or Anthropic. You can’t just pretend it’s startups doing all the agentic engineering. They’re just the ones pushing the boundaries on best practices the most aggressively. |
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| ▲ | techpression 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. I’ve heard some true horror stories already from companies who claim they’re doing amazing things with great results.
You should be especially on guard if it’s a publicly traded company, selling AI usage is necessary to appease the market (and thereby C-level stock value). |
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| ▲ | operatingthetan 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. This is a good call out, but I'm talking to a lot of friends at other companies. So my perspective is informed by both news and personal anecdote. | | |
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| ▲ | guelo 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well nobody has had to pay the tech debt yet on the last 6 months of that insanity. I think the age-old SWE best practices will still hold in time. |
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| ▲ | Copyrightest 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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