3 ms·
Couple points: > Instead of waiting, I spun up another agent to do something else. Then I did it again. > I wasn’t intentionally building a parallel system. I
by alexpotato 2mo ago
Couple points:
> Instead of waiting, I spun up another agent to do something else. Then I did it again.
> I wasn’t intentionally building a parallel system. I was just filling the time between tasks. I have ADHD. I got distracted.
I probably have ADD or ADHD and this feels "great" at first b/c you can just jump back and forth between 2-4 agents as they need input from you.
But I noticed:
1. I was EXHAUSTED at the end of the day
2. A lot of what each agent was doing I could do faster myself. Yes, if I do 10 units of work and 4 agents do 3 units then it's faster. That being said, sometimes all of the agents pick the dumb/slow path and now it's 4 agents times -2 units
> Having other agents review the code worked surprisingly well. They occasionally caught real bugs, and it was cheap enough to run several reviews. But I couldn’t merge something just because the agents approved it. I still had to understand the change. I was still responsible for the code that got merged.
My personal opinion is that LLMs have:
- 5x increase in triaging/debugging b/c they can read code WAY faster and make connections really quickly
- 2-3x writing code if you ALREADY have great, rock solid unit tests etc
- -1x to 1.5x improvement in writing greenfield code where you have no tests
That last one is b/c you are never 100% sure that the test is doing what you expected or the LLM is "hacking the test" (unless you REALLY read the code).
I think this disparity in performance across different sub-domains of being a SWE/SRE is why you get so many different opinions on LLMs