[gck1]

Agreed, but it's a bit nuanced. I'm working on a fairly complex project now in a domain where I have no technical experience. The first iteration of the project was complete garbage, but it was garbage mainly because I asked for things to be done and never asked HOW it should be done. Result? Complete, utter garbage. It kinda, sorta worked, but again, I would never use it in anything important.

Then we went through ~10 complete rewrites based on the learnings from previous attempts. As we went through these iterations, I became much more knowledgeable of the domain - because I saw failure points, I read the resulting code and because I asked the right questions.

Without AI, I would likely have given up after iteration 2, and certainly would not do 10 iterations.

So the nuance here is that iterating and throwing away the entire thing is going to become much cheaper, but not without an engineer being in the loop, asking the right questions.

Note: each iteration went through dual reviews of codex and opus at each phase with every finding fixed and review saying everything is perfect, the best thing on earth.

[busterarm]

I'm seeing similar process but on large teams still finding this output to be unmaintainable.

The problem is that vanishingly few people actually understand the code and are asking the agents to do all of the interpretation and reasoning for them.

This code that you've built is only maintainable for as long as you are still around at the company to work on it -- it's essentially a codebase that you're the only domain expert in. That's not a good outcome for companies either.

My prediction is that the companies that learn this lesson are the ones that are going to stick around. LLMs won't be in wide use for features but for throwaway busy-work type problems that eat lots of human resources and can't be ignored.

[gck1]

I left my last company job just before "AI-first engineering" became mainstream, and you confirmed what I was feeling all this time - I have absolutely zero idea how teams actually manage to collaborate with LLM-managed projects. All the projects that I'm working now are my own and the only reason why I could do this is because I had unlimited time and unlimited freedom. There's no chance I would be able to do this in a team setting.

I'm positive that the last company's CEO probably mandates by now that nobody must write a single line of code by hand and there's likely some rigid process everyone has to follow.

Fun times ahead.

[busterarm]

I agree and commiserate. In the near term my picture is pretty grim. There's fantastic uses for these tools but they're being abused.

I was big on correctness, software safety (think medical devices, not memory) and formal proofs anyway, so I think I'm just going to take the pay cut and start selecting for those types of jobs. Your run of the mill SaaS or open source+commercial companies are all becoming a death march.

[bluefirebrand]

> Your run of the mill SaaS or open source+commercial companies are all becoming a death march.

Most of them already were death marches to begin with, now they are firing squads