[nhaehnle]

I believe the article exaggerates to make a point. Yes, good engineering can also be assisted with LLM-based agents, but there is a delta.

Good engineering requires that you still pay attention to the result produced by the agent(s).

Bad engineering might skip over that part.

Therefore, via Amdahl's law, LLM-based agents overall provide more acceleration to bad engineering than they do to good engineering.

[0xcafefood]

The connection to Amdahl's law is totally on point. If you're just using LLMs as a faster way to get _your_ ideas down, but still want to ensure you validate and understand the output, you won't get the mythical 10x improvement so many seem to claim they're getting. And if you do want that 10x speedup, you have to forego the validation and understanding.

[koonsolo]

I do agree with you, but don't underestimate the projects where you can actually apply this 10x. For example, I wanted to get some analytics out of my database. What would have been a full weekend project was now done in an hour. So for such things there is a huge speed boost.

But once software becomes bigger and more complex, the LLM starts messing up, and the expert has to come in. That basicaly means your months project cannot be done in a week.

My personal prediction: plugins and systems that support plugins will become important. Because a plugin can be written at 10x speed. The system itself, not so much.

[judahmeek]

I think there will also be a lot of work in how to modularize month long projects into plugin sized pieces.

[koonsolo]

Yes, definitely. I also don't think every project is able to create a plugin platform. Sometimes you just have a lot of interconnected components, where they kind of influence each other.

What I was trying to say is that in future developments, as a developer, one of the extra questions on your mind should be: can we turn this into a platform with separate plugins? Because you know those plugins can be written fast, cheap, and don't require top notch engineering work.

But I think I get what you are saying: what you gain in plugin simplicity, you pay in effort to design the platform to support them.

I guess it will depend from project to project, and so the typical "it depends" applies :).

[0xcafefood]

People have been thinking about that a long time though. For that objective, LLMs don't seem to open up any new capabilities. If that problem could be solved, with really clean abstractions that dramatically reduce context needed to understand one "module" at a time, sure LLMs will then be able to take that an run. But it's a fundamentally hard problem.