> the models will find every possible algorithmic/design improvement

it's so hard to square such totalizing statements with my day to day experience with fable and sol, (every possible, improvement, really?? they are NOT omniscient) arguing with them/my colleagues' agents that no they have slowed down the system 200x with their terrible change, doing string operations on millions of db rows, trying to get it to understand that I don't care that it's calling it a "cache" if a cache hit is slower than what we had before.

These agents do let you learn codebases quickly, and produce code way faster. I don't look at IDEs all that often. But literally multiple times every single day I catch them doing something stupid.

I don't think its impossible that we could get better performance from the agents. I know ive tried all sorts of workflows and skills, few of which seem to have much effect on the things the models struggle with. I think a big part of it is encoding enough context for large codebases, and providing it with all the tools it needs to make it successful, things to automatically check its work, etc. But that's not automatic, in fact its generally a terrible judge of what it needs or what its bad at

yeah it's true, you do have to guide them. i find that the key is you have to know what's possible. you have to have the instinct for "this really shouldn't be so difficult". my junior SWE coworkers have the same trouble as your coworkers.

but the revolution is it doesn't take that long. in like 15 minutes you can chat with fable and get to the meat of whatever the issue is with repeated questioning. and then it does the solution for you. so it's not magic but it's still like a 100x speedup.