[hdivider]

Here's what I don't understand.

Developers who get excited by agentic development put out posts like this. (I get excited too.)

Other developers tend to point out objections in terms of maintainability, scalability, overly complicated solutions, and so on. All of which are valid.

However, this part of AI evolves very quickly. So given these are known problems, why shouldn't we expect rapid improvements in agentic AI systems for software development, to the point where software developers who stick with the old paradigm will indeed be eroded in time? I'm genuinely curious because clearly the speed of advancement is significant.

[bigiain]

> Other developers tend to point out objections in terms of maintainability, scalability, overly complicated solutions, and so on. All of which are valid.

I've spent the bulk of my 30+ career in various in-house dev/management roles, and small to medium sizes digital agencies or IT consulting places.

I that time I have worked on many hundreds of project, probably thousands.

There are maybe a few dozen that were still in production use without major rewrites on the way for more than 5 years.

I think for a huge amount of commercial projects, "maintainability" is something that developers are passional about, but that is of very little actual value to the client.

Back in the day when I spent a lot of time on comp.lang.perl.misc, there was a well know piece of advice "alway throw away the first version". My career-long takeaway from that has been to always race to a production ready proof of concept quickly enough to get it in front of people - ideally the people who are then spending the money that generates the business profits. Then if it turns successful, re write it from scratch incorporating everything you've learned from the first version - do not be tempted to continually tweak the hastily written code. These days people call something very like that "finding product market fit", and a common startup plan is to prove a business model, and them sell or be acquired before you need to spend the time/money on that rewrite.

[vages]

Anecdotally, I find early mover advantage to be overrated (ask anyone who bought Betamax or HD-DVD players). It is significantly cheaper – on average – to exploit what you already know and learn from the mistakes of other, earlier movers.

[lmm]

> However, this part of AI evolves very quickly. So given these are known problems, why shouldn't we expect rapid improvements in agentic AI systems for software development, to the point where software developers who stick with the old paradigm will indeed be eroded in time?

Because writing code has always been the easy part. A senior isn't someone who's better at writing code than a junior - they might well be worse at writing code. AI can now do the easy part, sure. What grounds does that present for believing that it's soon going to be able to do the hard part?

[enraged_camel]

I don’t know what level of experience you have with agentic AI, but the frontier models are also really good at things like product management and data modeling. You can start with a description of the problem and end up with a really solid design plan that you can then give the AI to implement.

So yeah, if you’re starting with a “write me code that does X Y Z” then you aren’t getting the most out of these tools, because you’re right, that’s not the hard part.

[XenophileJKO]

Which is where solution/product taste really comes in. Knowing what you are aiming at roughly goes so far in this new world.

[keybored]

Given that the problems are known and given that things are changing rapidly, we should expect them to be solved eventually (by some force)? No, I think the burden of proof is on whoever wants to address those problems. Not just refer to the never-changing answer “but why not?”[1]

All I see from “excited” developers is denial that there is a problem. But why would it be a problem that you have to review code generated by a program with the same fine-tooth comb that you use for human review?

[1] Some things change fast, some things never change at all.

[jimbokun]

That same argument points to all humans being irrelevant for all work in a few years.