It takes an incredibly detailed spec to get an LLM to not go completely off the rails and even then. The amount of time writing that spec can take more time than just doing it by hand.
There is way too much babysitting with these things.
I’m sure somehow somebody makes it work but I’m incredibly skeptical that you can let an LLM run unsupervised and only review its output as a PR.
> The amount of time writing that spec can take more time than just doing it by hand.
one thing about doing it by hand is you also notice holes/deficiencies in the spec and can go back and update it, make the product better, but just throwing it to an llm 'til its perfect-to-spec probably means its just going to be average quality at best...
tho tbh most software isn't really 'stunning' imo so maybe thats fine as far as most businesses are concerned... (sad face)
If you have a really detailed, well thought out spec, you do TDD and you have regular code review and refactor loops, agentic coding stays manageable.