[yard2010]

That's a really smart observation.

It's hard to add sophisticated abstractions though, because they are all selling text by the pounds (kilos?). So it feels the same as vendor lock for a cucumber seller, doesn't it? The seller can sell you an experience that would lock you in, but aside from it there is no moat since anyone can sell cucumbers.

[davedx]

To try and give examples: an autonomous agent that can integrate with github, read issues, then make pull requests against those issues is a step (or maybe two) above an LLM API (cucumber seller).

It doesn't take much more of a stretch to imagine teams of agents, coordinated by a "programme manager" agent, with "QA agents" working to defined quality metrics, "architect" agents that take initial requirements and break them down into system designs and github issues, and of course the super important "product owner" agent who talks to actual humans and writes initial requirements. Such a "software team system" would be another abstraction level above individual agents like Codex.

[kaibee]

I don't know what the future holds, but I know that this pattern is the 'horseless carriage' of developer automation.

[stuartjohnson12]

When people talk about how sophisticated hierarchical agent swarms will be built up that perfectly reflect existing human social structures I'm reminded distinctly of all the attempts to build DDD frameworks for modeling software, and then the actual result is that software went in the opposite direction - towards flattening.

As native LLM task completion horizons increase another order of magnitude, so much of this falls out of the window.

[max_on_hn]

This exactly. I built CheepCode to do the first part already, so it can accept tasks through Linear etc and submit PRs in GitHub. It already tests its work headlessly (including with Playwright if it’s web code), and I am almost done with the QA agent :-)