[Waterluvian]

That really sounds like micro managing jr. developers.

I wonder if the interface for this kind of thing might be better presented as a sort of JIRA ticket system. Define a dependency graph of work with the ability to break down any ticket into more tickets or change priority or relationships etc.

Though I think the micro manage part still doesn’t fit into that model. You’d need the code-level view and not just a ticket covering the tests that satisfy the spec and performance goals.

[qzira]

I think a lot of people feel this tension. Programming used to be mostly about building things directly. You write code, run it, fix it, repeat. With agents it starts to shift toward supervision: define the task, watch the output, correct the drift. It's a different kind of work. Sometimes it feels less like programming and more like managing a very fast team that never gets tired but also never really understands the goal unless you spell it out extremely carefully. I suspect a lot of developers still enjoy the "building" part more than the "supervising" part.

[ender341341]

> That really sounds like micro managing jr. developers.

That's how I tend to describe AI to a lot of non-technical people (I actually generally say it's like having an really fresh intern who can read technical docs insanely fast but needs a lot of supervision).

[qzira]

That's a really good analogy. The interesting part is that the "intern" is not only fast, but also extremely confident. A human intern usually hesitates, asks questions, or signals uncertainty when they are unsure. Agents often produce very clean-looking output even when the reasoning behind it is shaky. So part of the supervision isn't just checking the result, but trying to detect when the confidence is misleading.