Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sixhobbits 36 days ago
I have huge respect for Armin but all of the concerns about agents producing more code with less competent supervision from senior engineers doesn't seem that different from the status quo to me. A vast majority of all software I've ever professionally worked with has been terribly structured, hard to work with, full of bugs, etc, produced by mediocre to bad engineers and run by semi technical product owners or managers who basically promot the software into existence by making jira tickets on 2 week cycles to hold it together.

Yes it's awful, but it kind of works and has worked for a very long time. Agents are already improving a lot of open source software. Yes they're producing a lot of slop too, but having beautiful code, understanding how the system works and being able to delegate to a competent engineer you trust is reserved for the very few right now and I think we have all the systems and experience in place to deal with "bad" but working software so personally I am not concerned

1 comments

Yes, a lot of software shops have produced equivalent slop, but I've worked on teams that aimed higher, and they were much more productive over the long haul – not just in fewer bugs, but also in straight up ability to add more features as the software got complicated.