[stephenr]

> successfully adopting agentic engineering practices

What's your definition of "successfully"?

More LOC committed per day is probably the only one that's guaranteed when you let spicy autocomplete take the wheel.

I don't think it's at all possible to reason about the other more meaningful metrics in software development, because we simply don't have the context of what each human is working on, and as with the WYSIWYG fad of 3 decades ago, "success" is generally self-reported, by people who don't know what they don't know, and thus they don't know what spicy autocomplete is getting woefully wrong.

"But it {compiles,runs,etc}" isn't a meaningful metric when a large portion of the code in question is dynamic/loosely typed in a non-compiled language (JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc).

[bdangubic]

If you are on the right team with the right professionals you can measure. when we first started using LLMs we decided to run the same process as if they did not exist, same sprint planning meetings, same estimation. we did this for 6 months and saw roughly 55% increase in output compared to pre-LLM usage. there are biases in what were tried to achieve, it is not easy to estimate something will take XX hours when you know some portion (for example writing documentation or portions of the test coverage) you won’t have to write but we did our best. after we convinced ourselves of productivity gains we stopped doing this. saying you can’t measure something is typical SWE BS like “we can’t estimate” and the other lies we were able to convince everyone off successfully

[pepperoni_pizza]

Also, if your boss tells you "we're AI company now, you will use AI or be fired" then of course you will use AI and claim it is productive.