> The velocity is up AND the quality is up.

This is not my experience on a team of experienced SWEs working on a product worth 100m/year.

Agents are a great search engine for a codebase and really nice for debugging but anytime we have it write feature code it makes too many mistakes. We end up spending more time tuning the process than it takes to just write the code AND you are trading human context with agent context that gets wiped.

I can't speak to your experience. I can only speak to mine.

We've spent years reducing old debt and modernizing our application and processes. The places where we've made that investment are where we are currently seeing the additional acceleration. The places where we haven't are still stuck in the mud, but per your "search engine for a codebase" comment our engineers are starting to engage with systems they would not have previously touched.

There are areas for sure where LLMs would fall down. That's where we need the experts to guide them and restructure the project so that it is LLM friendly (which also just happens to be the same things that make the app better for human engineers).

And I'm serious about the quality comment. Maybe there's a difference in how your team is using the tools, but I have individuals on my team who are learning to leverage the tools to create better outputs, not just pump out features faster.

I'm not saying LLMs solve everything, FAR from it. But it's giving a master weapon to an experienced warrior.

Whenever actual studies are made about LLM coding they always show that LLM coding is a net loss in quality and delivery speed.

(They are good as coder psychotherapy tho.)