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I work at a company with approximately $1 million in revenue per engineer and multiple 10+ year old codebases. We use agents very aggressively, combined with b

by JPKab 7mo ago

I work at a company with approximately $1 million in revenue per engineer and multiple 10+ year old codebases. We use agents very aggressively, combined with beads, tons of tests, etc. You treat them like any developer, and review the code in PRs, provide feedback, have the agents act, and merge when it's good. We have gained tremendous velocity and have been able to tackle far more out of the backlog that we'd been forced to keep in the icebox before. This idea of setting the bar at "agents work without code reviews" is nuts.

hickelpickle 7mo ago
If there is one thing I have seen is that there is a subset of intellectual people will still be adverse to learning new tools, hang to ideological beliefs (I feel this though, watching programming as you know it die in a way, kinda makes you not want to follow it) and would prefer to just be lazy and not properly dogfood and learn their new tooling. I'm seeing amazing result to with agents, when provided an well formed knowledge base and directed through each piece of work like its a sprint. Review and iron out scope requirements, api surface/contract, have agents create multi phase implementation plans and technical specifications in a share dev directory and to make high quality changes logs, document future consideration and any bugs/issues found that can be deferred. Every phase is addressed with a human code review along with gemini who is great at catching drift from spec and bugs in less obvious places. While I'm sure an enterprise code base could still be an issue and would require even more direction (and opus I wont let touch java, it codes like an enterprise java greybeard who loves to create an interface/factory for everything), I think that's still just a tooling issues. I'm not of the super pro AI camp, but having followed its development and used it throughout. For the first time I am actual amazed and bothered, and convinced if people dont embrace these tools, they will be left behind. No they dont 10-100x a jr dev, but if someone has proper domain knowledge to direct the agent, performs dual research with it to iron things out with the human actually understanding the problem space, 2-5x seems quite reasonable currently if driven by a capable developer. But this just move the work to review and documentation maintenance/crafting. Which has its own fatigue and is less rewarding for a programmers mind who loves to solve challenges and gets dopamine from it . But given how man people are adverse...I dont think anyone who embraces it is going to have job security issues and be replaced, but here are many capable engineers who might due to their own reservations. I'm amazed by how many intelligent and capable people try llms/agents like a political straw man, there is no reasoning with them. They say vibe coding sucks (it does for anything more than a small throw away that wont be maintained), yet their examples for agents/llm not working is it can't just take a prompt and produce the best code ever and automatically and manifest the knowledge needed to work on their codebase. You still need to put in effort and learn to actually perform the engineering with the tools, but if it doesnt take a paragraph with no AGENTS.md and turn it into a feature or bug fix they are not good to them. Yeah they will get distracted and fuck up, just like if you throw 9/10 developers in the same situation and told them to get to work with no knowledge of the code base or domain and have their pr in by noon.
groundzeros2015 7mo ago
Why are you using experience and authoritative framing about a technology we’ve been using for less than 6 months?
- kasey_junk 7mo ago
  The person they are responding with dictated an authoritative framing that isn’t true. I know people have emotional responses to this, but if you think people aren’t effectively using agents to ship code in lots of domains, including existing legacy code bases, you are incorrect. Do we know exactly how to do that well, of course not, we still fruitlessly argue about how humans should write software. But there is a growing body of techniques on how to do agent first development, and a lot of those techniques are naturally converging because they work.
  - groundzeros2015 7mo ago
    I think programming effectiveness is inherently tied to the useful life of software, and we will need to see that play out. This is not to suggest that AI tools do not have value but that “I just have agents writing code and it works great!” Has yet to hit its test.
    - garciasn 7mo ago
      The views I see often shared here are typical of those in the trenches of the tech industry: conservative. I get it; I do. It's rapidly challenging the paradigm that we've setup over the years in a way that it's incredibly jarring, but this is going to be our new reality or you're going to be left behind in MOST industries; highly regulated industries are a different beast. So; instead of just out-of-hand dismissing this, figure out the best ways to integrate agents into your and your teams'/companies' workstreams. It will accelerate the work and change your role from what it is today to something different; something that takes time and experience to work with.
      - groundzeros2015 7mo ago
otabdeveloper4 7mo ago
> We have gained tremendous velocity and have been able to tackle far more out of the backlog that we'd been forced to keep in the icebox before. Source? Proofs? It's not the first, second or even third round on this rodeo. In other words, notto disu shittu agen.

by JPKab 7mo ago

hickelpickle 7mo ago

If there is one thing I have seen is that there is a subset of intellectual people will still be adverse to learning new tools, hang to ideological beliefs (I feel this though, watching programming as you know it die in a way, kinda makes you not want to follow it) and would prefer to just be lazy and not properly dogfood and learn their new tooling. I'm seeing amazing result to with agents, when provided an well formed knowledge base and directed through each piece of work like its a sprint. Review and iron out scope requirements, api surface/contract, have agents create multi phase implementation plans and technical specifications in a share dev directory and to make high quality changes logs, document future consideration and any bugs/issues found that can be deferred. Every phase is addressed with a human code review along with gemini who is great at catching drift from spec and bugs in less obvious places. While I'm sure an enterprise code base could still be an issue and would require even more direction (and opus I wont let touch java, it codes like an enterprise java greybeard who loves to create an interface/factory for everything), I think that's still just a tooling issues. I'm not of the super pro AI camp, but having followed its development and used it throughout. For the first time I am actual amazed and bothered, and convinced if people dont embrace these tools, they will be left behind. No they dont 10-100x a jr dev, but if someone has proper domain knowledge to direct the agent, performs dual research with it to iron things out with the human actually understanding the problem space, 2-5x seems quite reasonable currently if driven by a capable developer. But this just move the work to review and documentation maintenance/crafting. Which has its own fatigue and is less rewarding for a programmers mind who loves to solve challenges and gets dopamine from it . But given how man people are adverse...I dont think anyone who embraces it is going to have job security issues and be replaced, but here are many capable engineers who might due to their own reservations. I'm amazed by how many intelligent and capable people try llms/agents like a political straw man, there is no reasoning with them. They say vibe coding sucks (it does for anything more than a small throw away that wont be maintained), yet their examples for agents/llm not working is it can't just take a prompt and produce the best code ever and automatically and manifest the knowledge needed to work on their codebase. You still need to put in effort and learn to actually perform the engineering with the tools, but if it doesnt take a paragraph with no AGENTS.md and turn it into a feature or bug fix they are not good to them. Yeah they will get distracted and fuck up, just like if you throw 9/10 developers in the same situation and told them to get to work with no knowledge of the code base or domain and have their pr in by noon.

groundzeros2015 7mo ago

Why are you using experience and authoritative framing about a technology we’ve been using for less than 6 months?

kasey_junk 7mo ago
The person they are responding with dictated an authoritative framing that isn’t true. I know people have emotional responses to this, but if you think people aren’t effectively using agents to ship code in lots of domains, including existing legacy code bases, you are incorrect. Do we know exactly how to do that well, of course not, we still fruitlessly argue about how humans should write software. But there is a growing body of techniques on how to do agent first development, and a lot of those techniques are naturally converging because they work.
- groundzeros2015 7mo ago
  I think programming effectiveness is inherently tied to the useful life of software, and we will need to see that play out. This is not to suggest that AI tools do not have value but that “I just have agents writing code and it works great!” Has yet to hit its test.
  - garciasn 7mo ago
    The views I see often shared here are typical of those in the trenches of the tech industry: conservative. I get it; I do. It's rapidly challenging the paradigm that we've setup over the years in a way that it's incredibly jarring, but this is going to be our new reality or you're going to be left behind in MOST industries; highly regulated industries are a different beast. So; instead of just out-of-hand dismissing this, figure out the best ways to integrate agents into your and your teams'/companies' workstreams. It will accelerate the work and change your role from what it is today to something different; something that takes time and experience to work with.
    - groundzeros2015 7mo ago

otabdeveloper4 7mo ago

> We have gained tremendous velocity and have been able to tackle far more out of the backlog that we'd been forced to keep in the icebox before. Source? Proofs? It's not the first, second or even third round on this rodeo. In other words, notto disu shittu agen.