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>This is going to blow up. We are way past wringing our hands over agentic engineering. Every startup and all fast moving companies are onboard. They don't ha

>This is going to blow up. We are way past wringing our hands over agentic engineering. Every startup and all fast moving companies are onboard. They don't hand code anymore. There will not be some code quality crisis that will stop everyone in their tracks. I'm trying to cope with this too, but I don't think the best path is praying for failure.

guelo 7mo ago
Well nobody has had to pay the tech debt yet on the last 6 months of that insanity. I think the age-old SWE best practices will still hold in time.
Roguelazer 7mo ago
That's absolutely not true. The places that have embraced "agentic engineering" are mostly garbage factories, and lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. I recognize that most of the people on this site are just trying to self-promote for their own gig, but the level of misinformation is sometimes just staggering.
- operatingthetan 7mo ago
  >lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. Provide some examples then? Everyone who is all in on agentic code are pretty vocal about it. Who is declaring the opposite stance? Anyone?
  - VoidWarranty 7mo ago
    Both claims are hyperbole. Reality remains in the middle, but there are plenty of examples of either extreme right now.
- sothatsit 7mo ago
  It is not just startups or small companies embracing agentic engineering… Stripe published blog posts about their autonomous coding agents. Amazon is blowing up production because they gave their agents access to prod. Google and Microsoft develop their own agentic engineering tools. It’s not just tech companies either, massive companies are frequently announcing their partnerships with OpenAI or Anthropic. You can’t just pretend it’s startups doing all the agentic engineering. They’re just the ones pushing the boundaries on best practices the most aggressively.
- burningChrome 7mo ago
  Want something to be terrified of? I work at a massive health care company. They're 100% on the AI bandwagon and are putting AI everywhere they can. Billing, Software, DevOps, everywhere. If you think you can give an Agent some information and have go to work for some user, its 100% on the table for the company to do and either a) then outsource the rest offshore or b) lay the person off or shrink the department to increase the bottom line. Your healthcare, right now, is being offloaded to AI agents and bots and this is only the beginning.
  - lp0_on_fire 7mo ago
    I literally just sat through the annual “choose your healthcare” plan bullshit and the “meeting” was literally one of the Hr people pulling up a power point narrated by “AI”. You could tell in the first ten seconds. You’d think our plans would be cheaper given they’re offloading all this work to agents they don’t have to pay a salary to…right?
- k32k 7mo ago
  Indeed, I feel this place has gone insane. There's no balance here. You've got boosters and then you've got people who are panicking/fighting against anything pro-AI.
techpression 7mo ago
Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. I’ve heard some true horror stories already from companies who claim they’re doing amazing things with great results. You should be especially on guard if it’s a publicly traded company, selling AI usage is necessary to appease the market (and thereby C-level stock value).
- operatingthetan 7mo ago
  >Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. This is a good call out, but I'm talking to a lot of friends at other companies. So my perspective is informed by both news and personal anecdote.
  - techpression 7mo ago
    Sure, it goes both ways, I’m having great results at the startup I’m working at too.
torben-friis 7mo ago
Just out of the popularity of the claim, I’ll bite. Both big tech and startups are now full of people working at 10x, features are written as fast as PMs can think them, monoliths self heal with agents buzzing over them. 10x means 10 times the outcomes in a given amount of time, so did you see the last iOS version pack a decade worth of features in a single release? Do you remember when meta moved their backend to rust in a month? What about Microsoft software not having a single bug in a year? Yeah, me neither.
- operatingthetan 7mo ago
  I didn't say anything about increased productivity or 10x. Feel free to revise your strawman.
  - afavour 7mo ago
    If there’s no increased productivity then what’s the point in spending all the money?
    - operatingthetan 7mo ago
      I didn't say there was or there wasn't. They just don't get to infer that I did and then attack that as my position.
      - sifar 7mo ago
        What is your position? Genuinely asking as someone who is similarly trying to cope and doesn't want to travel down the road being trampled on. Primarily because it doesn't make me better, it doesn't benefit me as an individual and takes the joy out from understanding things.
  - torben-friis 7mo ago
    Fair, let’s revise it then. If not productivity, what’s the result AI is getting that is disruptive enough to make our previous work obsolete?
autoexec 7mo ago
> I don't think the best path is praying for failure. Embrace it "Embrace failure" is exactly the attitude every company is going to take. They've already been working at bottoming out our expectations. We should have been running companies out of business with regulations and abandonment when their human-written software leaked our private data to criminals, or when their untested forced-updates shut down our systems and sent our IT teams scrambling, or when their unoptimized code forced us to upgrade our hardware or negated any performance gains we should have seen from investing in upgrades. The quality, reliability, and security of the software we all use and depend on is going to nosedive, and companies already know they can get away with it. They aren't going to start caring about how we feel about that now. "Pay more and settle for less" is where we are today. "Embrace Failure" is the future we're sprinting towards.
Copyrightest 7mo ago
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guelo 7mo ago

Well nobody has had to pay the tech debt yet on the last 6 months of that insanity. I think the age-old SWE best practices will still hold in time.

Roguelazer 7mo ago

That's absolutely not true. The places that have embraced "agentic engineering" are mostly garbage factories, and lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. I recognize that most of the people on this site are just trying to self-promote for their own gig, but the level of misinformation is sometimes just staggering.

operatingthetan 7mo ago
>lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. Provide some examples then? Everyone who is all in on agentic code are pretty vocal about it. Who is declaring the opposite stance? Anyone?
- VoidWarranty 7mo ago
  Both claims are hyperbole. Reality remains in the middle, but there are plenty of examples of either extreme right now.
sothatsit 7mo ago
It is not just startups or small companies embracing agentic engineering… Stripe published blog posts about their autonomous coding agents. Amazon is blowing up production because they gave their agents access to prod. Google and Microsoft develop their own agentic engineering tools. It’s not just tech companies either, massive companies are frequently announcing their partnerships with OpenAI or Anthropic. You can’t just pretend it’s startups doing all the agentic engineering. They’re just the ones pushing the boundaries on best practices the most aggressively.
burningChrome 7mo ago
Want something to be terrified of? I work at a massive health care company. They're 100% on the AI bandwagon and are putting AI everywhere they can. Billing, Software, DevOps, everywhere. If you think you can give an Agent some information and have go to work for some user, its 100% on the table for the company to do and either a) then outsource the rest offshore or b) lay the person off or shrink the department to increase the bottom line. Your healthcare, right now, is being offloaded to AI agents and bots and this is only the beginning.
- lp0_on_fire 7mo ago
  I literally just sat through the annual “choose your healthcare” plan bullshit and the “meeting” was literally one of the Hr people pulling up a power point narrated by “AI”. You could tell in the first ten seconds. You’d think our plans would be cheaper given they’re offloading all this work to agents they don’t have to pay a salary to…right?
k32k 7mo ago
Indeed, I feel this place has gone insane. There's no balance here. You've got boosters and then you've got people who are panicking/fighting against anything pro-AI.

techpression 7mo ago

Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. I’ve heard some true horror stories already from companies who claim they’re doing amazing things with great results. You should be especially on guard if it’s a publicly traded company, selling AI usage is necessary to appease the market (and thereby C-level stock value).

operatingthetan 7mo ago
>Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. This is a good call out, but I'm talking to a lot of friends at other companies. So my perspective is informed by both news and personal anecdote.
- techpression 7mo ago
  Sure, it goes both ways, I’m having great results at the startup I’m working at too.

torben-friis 7mo ago

Just out of the popularity of the claim, I’ll bite. Both big tech and startups are now full of people working at 10x, features are written as fast as PMs can think them, monoliths self heal with agents buzzing over them. 10x means 10 times the outcomes in a given amount of time, so did you see the last iOS version pack a decade worth of features in a single release? Do you remember when meta moved their backend to rust in a month? What about Microsoft software not having a single bug in a year? Yeah, me neither.

operatingthetan 7mo ago
I didn't say anything about increased productivity or 10x. Feel free to revise your strawman.
- afavour 7mo ago
  If there’s no increased productivity then what’s the point in spending all the money?
  - operatingthetan 7mo ago
    I didn't say there was or there wasn't. They just don't get to infer that I did and then attack that as my position.
    - sifar 7mo ago
      What is your position? Genuinely asking as someone who is similarly trying to cope and doesn't want to travel down the road being trampled on. Primarily because it doesn't make me better, it doesn't benefit me as an individual and takes the joy out from understanding things.
- torben-friis 7mo ago
  Fair, let’s revise it then. If not productivity, what’s the result AI is getting that is disruptive enough to make our previous work obsolete?

autoexec 7mo ago

> I don't think the best path is praying for failure. Embrace it "Embrace failure" is exactly the attitude every company is going to take. They've already been working at bottoming out our expectations. We should have been running companies out of business with regulations and abandonment when their human-written software leaked our private data to criminals, or when their untested forced-updates shut down our systems and sent our IT teams scrambling, or when their unoptimized code forced us to upgrade our hardware or negated any performance gains we should have seen from investing in upgrades. The quality, reliability, and security of the software we all use and depend on is going to nosedive, and companies already know they can get away with it. They aren't going to start caring about how we feel about that now. "Pay more and settle for less" is where we are today. "Embrace Failure" is the future we're sprinting towards.

Copyrightest 7mo ago

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