4 ms·

My biggest issue with these type of posts is that they never answer the "why". Hell, they don't even ask the "why". > The more modular your code, the more agen

by lofties 2mo ago

My biggest issue with these type of posts is that they never answer the "why". Hell, they don't even ask the "why". > The more modular your code, the more agents you can run OK, but why would I want to run more agents? So I can be more productive? What does this productivity lead to? And are we actually being more productive? Take a look at Bun's repo on GitHub which seems to be fully automated. Well over 5000 PRs open. What's the use? How can we justify these 5000 PRs? Over the past years, software has become considerably more shit. Are these 5000 PRs improving the quality of software? Is the end-user reaping the rewards? Are they getting better software, cheaper? The answer to all of those is going to be "no". And let's take Uber for example. They have many teams, and many more times the services. Has ride hailing become cheaper? No. Has it become more efficient? No. Nothing is getting better, but at least we're all off worse!

wseqyrku 2mo ago
> but why would I want to run more agents? Notice how difficult it is to turn off photo bursts in iPhone? Because that free cloud space needs to be filled fast. So ask your question again and you will find the answer very rapidly. They even gave it a cool name, "tokenmaxxing" what even the fuck.
- cyh555 2mo ago
  it's against the social rules to call them out
  - wseqyrku 2mo ago
    Imo it should be against the social rules to fuck people over.
serious_angel 2mo ago
Thank you. I do not believe the author has any idea what he is talking about, too. It's worth to also mention some basics: 1. Dependency on some outsourced LLM vendors (no Internet? No API response? Welp, you do you.); 2. Undefined amount of payments/paid subscriptions at vendors; 3. Undefined amount of tokens burnt on each prompt/iteration within undisclosed algorithms; 4. Absolutely no responsibility/copyright for the LLM output; 5. Privacy concerns on inside/company project source code uploaded; 6. Incremental eventual atrophy of developer's own skills; 7. Inhuman attitude for art, development, effort, purpose in general, since the models are built on stolen effort of other, now unknown, people...
horsawlarway 2mo ago
Yeah, I think engineering orgs mostly jumped the shark. Metrics like pr count and commits have always been terrible gauges for success compared to business performance. But they're easy to measure, and even easier to game now with AI. So we're seeing an outrageous gain on these metrics, and they've become almost completely divorced from business results. No one cares how fast you ship prs. They care that you offer a compelling product, that works when they need it work, for a price they're able and willing to pay. It's like we've decided to measure how far we've traveled in gallons of gas burned, but completely forgotten about measuring miles per gallon.
- mushroom_lasagn 2mo ago
  My organization has noticed that some people's output has gone way up since they started using AI, while some people's has not. I imagine output is measured by LOC and MRs, since we are bad at metrics. There's now an effort to figure out why the laggards aren't using their AI "well" enough. I've seen some of the increased output that was sprayed at my team without consent, it was work that superficially looked good but on closer investigation did not solve the problem it was intended to. All that work has to be redone. The rework is being done quietly, so as not to draw management ire for a lack of "productivity". It's all so tiresome.
  - antonvs 2mo ago
    > The rework is being done quietly This is a bad idea - you’re actively contributing to the problem by hiding the negative effects. Don’t even think about starting that work until you’ve created bug tickets for as much of it as you can, and bright then to management’s attention. Management then needs to figure out priorities for doing that work and whether a change in approach is needed.
- skydhash 2mo ago
  > It's like we've decided to measure how far we've traveled in gallons of gas burned, but completely forgotten about measuring miles per gallon. Or forgotten to look at the map to see if we're getting closer to our destination. I've never seen a consumer bugs that complains about how small our codebase is or how little PRs we have produced this month. It's always about some features not working properly. Previously the core metrics were reducing consumer complaints and implementing features for the sales team to attract new clients. Then they suddenly got replaced by amount of PRs and token usages.
linkregister 2mo ago
I find that ride hailing is both cheaper and more plentiful compared to taxis in 2010. Even in non-inflation-adjusted amounts. Ride hailing and food delivery companies provide dispatching and coordination at a very large scale effectively. I agree that these companies' products were fully mature prior to usable coding agents in late 2025, so I don't understand why they would require a large volume of code changes beyond minor promotions and localization enhancements. I would expect their challenges to be in the ML, data, storage, capacity, and compute infrastructure areas.
i_love_retros 2mo ago
My ex boss who was very very pro AI would constantly say that we need to be more productive. Which triggered in me the question of "why". Aren't we producing enough as a society at this point? We have enough for everyone, and the fact that it's not being shared fairly has nothing to do with productivity. We don't need "more", we need " better". And I don't think most uses of AI will lead to that. If we lived in a more just society I think we would concentrate all the AI resources on a few key areas where it could genuinely help make things better, like medical research. We don't need more and more crud apps.
- shimman 2mo ago
  You would absolutely love the book Dawn of Everything. Humans are way more creative at social cohesion when you remove oligarchs and authoritarians.
coffeefirst 2mo ago
Uh-huh. I have a little boy who just saw his first firetruck, and you can see the wheels turning in his head, because BIG RED TRUCK. He doesn't talk yet, but a seed has been planted. Some people operate like little boys. They want the BIG RED TRUCK. They haven't considered that's it's really hard to park and gets 5MPG, or that their use cases don't involve fighting fires (for which they are not trained), but they want the big red truck so they can drive the big red truck. Anyway, if you go the 5000 microservices route, you move all your problems from the application layer into networking and orchestration problems. Best of luck with that.
jcelerier 2mo ago
> OK, but why would I want to run more agents? So I can be more productive? What does this productivity lead to? software used outside of nerd niches? photoshop, canva, clickup, after effects and unreal engine over feh, imagemagick, impressive, emacs org mode, ffmpeg CLI and pico-8?
- sokoloff 2mo ago
  While I’m sure there’s a sliver of usage outside, I’d wager most emacs org mode usage is firmly inside what the average human would consider a nerd niche.
  - jcelerier 1mo ago
    well yes, that's what i'm saying. most people that interact with a computer use notion, a small percentage obsidian, and a fraction of that emacs org mode or other similar tools. I use zim-wiki but I don't expect most people to do the same, just like I don't expect most musicians to learn lilypond
    - sokoloff 1mo ago
      Ah. I misread your list. I missed the "over" as a contrasting conjunction, in part because there are plenty of non-nerd [albeit perhaps scripted-by-one] usages of imagemagick and ffmpeg, so I didn't readily detect it was a list A and a list B. There was enough there; I missed it.

by lofties 2mo ago

wseqyrku 2mo ago

> but why would I want to run more agents? Notice how difficult it is to turn off photo bursts in iPhone? Because that free cloud space needs to be filled fast. So ask your question again and you will find the answer very rapidly. They even gave it a cool name, "tokenmaxxing" what even the fuck.

cyh555 2mo ago
it's against the social rules to call them out
- wseqyrku 2mo ago
  Imo it should be against the social rules to fuck people over.

serious_angel 2mo ago

Thank you. I do not believe the author has any idea what he is talking about, too. It's worth to also mention some basics: 1. Dependency on some outsourced LLM vendors (no Internet? No API response? Welp, you do you.); 2. Undefined amount of payments/paid subscriptions at vendors; 3. Undefined amount of tokens burnt on each prompt/iteration within undisclosed algorithms; 4. Absolutely no responsibility/copyright for the LLM output; 5. Privacy concerns on inside/company project source code uploaded; 6. Incremental eventual atrophy of developer's own skills; 7. Inhuman attitude for art, development, effort, purpose in general, since the models are built on stolen effort of other, now unknown, people...

horsawlarway 2mo ago

Yeah, I think engineering orgs mostly jumped the shark. Metrics like pr count and commits have always been terrible gauges for success compared to business performance. But they're easy to measure, and even easier to game now with AI. So we're seeing an outrageous gain on these metrics, and they've become almost completely divorced from business results. No one cares how fast you ship prs. They care that you offer a compelling product, that works when they need it work, for a price they're able and willing to pay. It's like we've decided to measure how far we've traveled in gallons of gas burned, but completely forgotten about measuring miles per gallon.

mushroom_lasagn 2mo ago
My organization has noticed that some people's output has gone way up since they started using AI, while some people's has not. I imagine output is measured by LOC and MRs, since we are bad at metrics. There's now an effort to figure out why the laggards aren't using their AI "well" enough. I've seen some of the increased output that was sprayed at my team without consent, it was work that superficially looked good but on closer investigation did not solve the problem it was intended to. All that work has to be redone. The rework is being done quietly, so as not to draw management ire for a lack of "productivity". It's all so tiresome.
- antonvs 2mo ago
  > The rework is being done quietly This is a bad idea - you’re actively contributing to the problem by hiding the negative effects. Don’t even think about starting that work until you’ve created bug tickets for as much of it as you can, and bright then to management’s attention. Management then needs to figure out priorities for doing that work and whether a change in approach is needed.
skydhash 2mo ago
> It's like we've decided to measure how far we've traveled in gallons of gas burned, but completely forgotten about measuring miles per gallon. Or forgotten to look at the map to see if we're getting closer to our destination. I've never seen a consumer bugs that complains about how small our codebase is or how little PRs we have produced this month. It's always about some features not working properly. Previously the core metrics were reducing consumer complaints and implementing features for the sales team to attract new clients. Then they suddenly got replaced by amount of PRs and token usages.

linkregister 2mo ago

I find that ride hailing is both cheaper and more plentiful compared to taxis in 2010. Even in non-inflation-adjusted amounts. Ride hailing and food delivery companies provide dispatching and coordination at a very large scale effectively. I agree that these companies' products were fully mature prior to usable coding agents in late 2025, so I don't understand why they would require a large volume of code changes beyond minor promotions and localization enhancements. I would expect their challenges to be in the ML, data, storage, capacity, and compute infrastructure areas.

i_love_retros 2mo ago

My ex boss who was very very pro AI would constantly say that we need to be more productive. Which triggered in me the question of "why". Aren't we producing enough as a society at this point? We have enough for everyone, and the fact that it's not being shared fairly has nothing to do with productivity. We don't need "more", we need " better". And I don't think most uses of AI will lead to that. If we lived in a more just society I think we would concentrate all the AI resources on a few key areas where it could genuinely help make things better, like medical research. We don't need more and more crud apps.

shimman 2mo ago
You would absolutely love the book Dawn of Everything. Humans are way more creative at social cohesion when you remove oligarchs and authoritarians.

coffeefirst 2mo ago

Uh-huh. I have a little boy who just saw his first firetruck, and you can see the wheels turning in his head, because BIG RED TRUCK. He doesn't talk yet, but a seed has been planted. Some people operate like little boys. They want the BIG RED TRUCK. They haven't considered that's it's really hard to park and gets 5MPG, or that their use cases don't involve fighting fires (for which they are not trained), but they want the big red truck so they can drive the big red truck. Anyway, if you go the 5000 microservices route, you move all your problems from the application layer into networking and orchestration problems. Best of luck with that.

jcelerier 2mo ago

> OK, but why would I want to run more agents? So I can be more productive? What does this productivity lead to? software used outside of nerd niches? photoshop, canva, clickup, after effects and unreal engine over feh, imagemagick, impressive, emacs org mode, ffmpeg CLI and pico-8?

sokoloff 2mo ago
While I’m sure there’s a sliver of usage outside, I’d wager most emacs org mode usage is firmly inside what the average human would consider a nerd niche.
- jcelerier 1mo ago
  well yes, that's what i'm saying. most people that interact with a computer use notion, a small percentage obsidian, and a fraction of that emacs org mode or other similar tools. I use zim-wiki but I don't expect most people to do the same, just like I don't expect most musicians to learn lilypond
  - sokoloff 1mo ago
    Ah. I misread your list. I missed the "over" as a contrasting conjunction, in part because there are plenty of non-nerd [albeit perhaps scripted-by-one] usages of imagemagick and ffmpeg, so I didn't readily detect it was a list A and a list B. There was enough there; I missed it.