I find these blog posts (and the originals, with Anthropic's C compiler and Cursor's browser) somewhat funny, as if they have this enormous power to build ... but they can't build something unique or new. Like the software sucks, but look how powerful the process is (the models are indeed powerful).

And it's a bit of a shame: by virtue of their position (their embedding in the fabric of venture capitalism), it seems like they can only make a subset of things -- what they can make is dictated enormously by capital, as they are engines of capital.

Not sure the point I'm trying to make, I just find it amusing.

Perhaps the point is that it might be more worthwhile to give independent creators a billion dollars to play around with agent swarms if we want to keep diversity in the evolutionary algorithm that is the software industry high.

Because it's mostly a load of crap.

Most of these reusable, automated workflows sound really cool in theory, but in practice either they require a lot of customization (not really reusable) or a lot of babysitting (not really automated).

AI has improved my productivity significantly, I'm not a hater, but we also have to be honest about its (current) limitations. The whole "software factory" thing is just a pipe dream people sell to execs / investors / online courses.

Yes, that's true, but in the post, they even mention that building the spec is the scarce resource.

  For that to work, the swarm has to actually follow the spec, which is what much of this post is about. We gave the swarm 835 pages of prose and it came back with a database. What was scarce in this experiment, and what we expect to be scarce in software engineering going forward, is the right description of intent.

Well, the tool works well. I am grateful that Nature has seen fit that the same kind of person who can make it doesn’t also have the ability to identify what needs exist in the market because then all software would flow out of OpenAI and Anthropic and the rest of us would run about their legs and peep about. Whether product development will survive the next generation of models is still unknown.

it feels kind of like a concept car a large manufacturer would show off at a motor show. Everyone knows there is no intention to actually ship that thing, but they're exploring concepts and technology and trying to make inroads in what comes next.

The bottleneck has always been on the product side for 99% of cases. For the 1% where it's engineering, LLMs don't help as much.