In our team's experience, the product of agents is generally The Homer (1). It does work, but it's vastly overengineered.

When I personally want tight code, I have to spend a considerable amount of time adjusting it manually:

- It needs to be trimmed down. In my experience, at least one agent I use struggles to produce minimalist designs, and it's very frustrating

- I need to consider whether there are solutions based on higher-level assumptions, that AIs typically miss

- I need to check whether there are off-the-shelf solutions - AIs like to reinvent the wheel

IMO, software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same.

(1) https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer

▲ dieselgate 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It took me a few seconds of deliberating if The Homer was a reference to baseball or "The Odyssey" and then realized there was a footnote

> software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same.

Agreed.

	▲	GoofGarage 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I believe “The Homer” is a reference to Season 2, Episode 15 of The Simpsons, “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” Homer reunites with his long lost brother, who runs car company Powell Motors. Homer is ultimately tasked by his brother with helping to design a car for the “average man” that ultimately bankrupts the company for being wildly overengineered and costing too much ($82,000 in 1991-money). Here’s the car: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer

▲ pianopatrick 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If software has become a mass-produced commodity then seems to me the software business will become a much more finance focused business

You will really have to weigh the cost of making the software against the expected revenue.

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roncesvalles 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Since software is still a winner-takes-all market, the mass-production property of software doesn't really matter.

In such markets, what you produce is either worth nothing or worth millions of dollars. For as long as it's the case that well-constructed code (with or without LLM help) is more likely to be in the latter category, the economics of software don't really change.

Even before LLMs, you could've commissioned a half-assed clone of any app you wanted from a 3rd world consultancy for a few thousand dollars. LLMs are basically Bangalore-as-API.

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pianopatrick 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think part of the reason software was winner take most was the difficulty of making software.

I remember hearing a story that in the past movies were so technically difficult to make that any movie that got made had a good chance to be a profitable hit. But as movies got cheaper to make, more movies got made. Nowadays movie studio execs have to really calculate out the audience and expected revenue for any new movie and balance that against the budget and the cost of the studio's failed movies.

I think a similar dynamic may happen in software

	▲	hyperadvanced an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That honestly sounds a lot healthier than “just ship what the CTO/Product team wants” with as much hand waving as is necessary to very roughly estimate ROI and then pray it hits with the market. In anything that’s not a startup operating in a new industry, the “old way” is a hard way to run a business

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oblio 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Since software is still a winner-takes-all market, the mass-production property of software doesn't really matter.

Fairly sure software dev was always an iceberg. Most software and most software devs aren't working on horizontal software, but on vertical software, in cost centers. Sales for that kind of software don't scale as much.

	▲	roncesvalles 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Most vertical software is just horizontal software glued together

▲ frevib 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No surprise, LLM companies optimize for waste. More tokens, and more prompts means more revenue. Reminds of Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan story: deliberately making search worse [1]

[1]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-r...

	▲	nomel an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Or, more likely, it's that concise code requires a much deeper, wholistic, understanding that these models just are capable of yet. Same with a junior dev. They don't write long form spaghetti because they're trying to write more LOC. They do it because not doing it is hard, literally above their pay grade. I use LLM every day, but they're still completely awful at architecture. I don't think this clear lack of ability is some conspiracy.

▲ eitally 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a business user, the same thing is true for non-code documents. The biggest exertion is reducing the excessive slop down to concise, clear points.

▲ sublinear 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> software production has become a mass-produced commodity

For who?

The public? The public has never liked buying software at any price.

Businesses? Businesses need higher quality software when it's relevant to their core competencies, so they hire people instead. Buying competing SaaS or depending too much on AI is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

▲ extr 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This was more true a few months ago but Fable has improved the situation considerably.

Also just remember - minimalist code looks and feels great but customers do not read your code. I have caught myself many times providing "corrections" to abstractions that were already ~fine, just not perfect. The average SWE costs $200/hr. Careful you don't burn $50 worrying about code that will likely be rewritten or can be better abstracted when that's actually needed.

▲ dieselgate 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The average SWE costs $200/hr

This is a pointless quibble but the hourly rate claim is not true--it's like ~$60 in the USA [0]. Maybe you meant at a specific Org but this is important context when comparing "pricing" between human and AI.

[0] https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/software-developer/u...

▲ extr 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How is this not true? Taking a Senior SWE @ ~$200K, even just the base salary cost / 2080 working hours is $100/hr. Fully loaded employer cost + accounting for non-coding time gets you to upper 100s easily.

Even for a junior making $100K, I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so.

Edit: Fine, "Senior" is not "Average". But naive salary is not the true numerator.

▲ pdhborges 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

   I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so.

In many places in Europe it is.

	▲	Foobar8568 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Western Europe is mostly consultancy, and the rate paid by client is usually higher, and doesn't matter if it's eastern Europe, Portugal or even India.
	▲	rustystump 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It is. And the quality is on par with any us eng. People here forget that the big comp packages are a minority even in the US. The cost tho is much higher than just salary.

▲ anon73044 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Company time != Pay rate, if you're working somewhere that's publicly traded check out "revenue per employee" metrics sometime.

▲ jknoepfler 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hire contractors for a large enterprise in the US. The going rate is typically $85-$100/hr for a senior dev, depending on specialization. Lead-level maybe $120 for the right skill set.

▲ sublinear 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course, the SWEs making that much (over 200k) are not representative of the broader field. That's the point.

Pay hits a ceiling, and that ceiling is moving lower regardless of experience. That has nothing to do with AI, but what the market will bear. Hiring counts of humans must increase no matter what. Moving some of the spend to AI reduces the risk of hiring less qualified employees they might have rejected a decade ago.

Wages at the top end are stagnating to subsidize this. That's undeniable.

▲ copperx 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

$15, where we're going.

	▲	fragmede 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour

▲ russellbeattie 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

An MBA's rule of thumb is that a full time employee's hourly cost to a business is at least 1.5x to 2x times their salary depending on employer taxes, benefits, offices, travel, training, hardware, perks, etc.

▲ BobbyJo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Minimalist code is necessary to keep AI agents working well for longer than a month on a system IME. At a certain point, their own machinations overwhelm them and they both slow down, and make worse and worse decisions.

	▲	gracehenry45 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

▲ sejje 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also, you can probably think about it like this:

"Will I benefit from this code being minimalist before [date]", where [date] is whenever you think the agent will be good enough to come back and make the corrections you would make today.

▲ j-bos 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The average SWE costs $200/hr.

And this is how I find out I'm woefully underpaid.

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icedchai 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That "cost" includes all the overhead provided by the company: benefits, rent for offices, utilities, equipment, etc. The average SWE is not taking home anything close to that, outside of Silicon Valley and a few other limited areas.

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jacquesm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Whatever you are making this year as SWE you'll be making less next year if the current trend in improvement of AI coding aids is going to be sustained. Think about it : programmers used to derive a lot of their value from the fact that it was a hard skill to acquire. My kids can now 'vibe code' stuff faster (and better looking) than what I could come up with as the beginnings of a design plan. And then I still need to implement it.

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alfalfasprout 5 hours ago | parent [-]

There's a massive difference between your kids vibe coding something and an engineer using AI to implement something. If you're unable to discern the difference, that's something to reflect on :)

	▲	throw-the-towel 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It doesn't matter if GP is able to discern the difference, it matters if your CEO is forced to care about the difference.

▲ slopinthebag 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The average SWE makes $400k a year? Are you being serious?

	▲	fragmede 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Costs, not makes. That includes employer taxes, benefits, offices, travel, training, hardware, any perks.