[flagged]
There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
11–20 of 183 posts
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#12Why not just bake an agent into every service and chat with it? Sounds more fun at least.
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#13Hundreds of bots modifying thousands of microservices may sound good on the surface, but all those thousands of microservices make up an architecture and a product.
Agents aren't very good at carrying the entire model in their context, so when they reason about a small piece of code, they often come up with something that hurts other parts of the code (especially as the KLOCs pile up). The complexity hasn't been replaced, only moved. And guess what's going to happen when all of these microservices become even more of a moving target than they already are?
AI is capable of improving productivity, but this approach sounds more like a nightmare in the making.
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#14Hundreds of bots modifying thousands of microservices may sound good on the surface, but all those thousands of microservices make up an architecture and a product. Agents aren't very good at carrying the entire model in their context, so when they reason about a small piece of code, they often come up with something that hurts other parts of the code (especially as the KLOCs pile up). The complexity hasn't been repl…
The agents are like ants, and ants build like crazy until the resources run out in winter. AI winter is going to be interesting, to say the least.
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#15Hundreds of bots modifying thousands of microservices may sound good on the surface, but all those thousands of microservices make up an architecture and a product. Agents aren't very good at carrying the entire model in their context, so when they reason about a small piece of code, they often come up with something that hurts other parts of the code (especially as the KLOCs pile up). The complexity hasn't been repl…
Seems to me the real question is "what scheme can we use to organize our code base such that an agent working on one part really can make changes and not break the other parts on accident".
My current theory I might test out is to treat generative AI as generative AI. This means instead of editing things like a microservice in place you version freeze them to bug fixes only and create new versions for new features. This way you can go and update all the places that use the old version to the new version one at a time. As you do you can check that the new version does not break anything while still having an old version to fall back to.
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#16Hundreds of bots modifying thousands of microservices may sound good on the surface, but all those thousands of microservices make up an architecture and a product. Agents aren't very good at carrying the entire model in their context, so when they reason about a small piece of code, they often come up with something that hurts other parts of the code (especially as the KLOCs pile up). The complexity hasn't been repl…
The agents are like ants, and ants build like crazy until the resources run out in winter. AI winter is going to be interesting, to say the least.
I don't say this to be mean, but you need to plan for a world where it's always summer. Maybe the valuations will collapse with OSS models but programming is never going back to normal.
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#17My 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 op…
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…
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.
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
The agents are like ants, and ants build like crazy until the resources run out in winter. AI winter is going to be interesting, to say the least.
I don't say this to be mean, but you need to plan for a world where it's always summer. Maybe the valuations will collapse with OSS models but programming is never going back to normal.
> but programming is never going back to normal.
Are you telling it's shit now? I'm just curious.
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#19Hundreds of bots modifying thousands of microservices may sound good on the surface, but all those thousands of microservices make up an architecture and a product. Agents aren't very good at carrying the entire model in their context, so when they reason about a small piece of code, they often come up with something that hurts other parts of the code (especially as the KLOCs pile up). The complexity hasn't been repl…
The agents are like ants, and ants build like crazy until the resources run out in winter. AI winter is going to be interesting, to say the least.
[deleted]
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#20Hundreds of bots modifying thousands of microservices may sound good on the surface, but all those thousands of microservices make up an architecture and a product. Agents aren't very good at carrying the entire model in their context, so when they reason about a small piece of code, they often come up with something that hurts other parts of the code (especially as the KLOCs pile up). The complexity hasn't been repl…
Seems to me the real question is "what scheme can we use to organize our code base such that an agent working on one part really can make changes and not break the other parts on accident". My current theory I might test out is to treat generative AI as generative AI. This means instead of editing things like a microservice in place you version freeze them to bug fixes only and create new versions for new features. T…
This would presuppose only a single new version being "in-flight". But a microservice change often bleeds into another microservice having to change. Multiply this by all the agents working on the product, and you get a very complicated release process for those microservices.
The ripple effects are basically the same as what you'd get in a monolithic codebase. In fact you can still think of a set of microservices as a single codebase, just not centrally maintained anymore. The complexity is moved rather than eliminated. And you'll still have agents (and people) stepping on each other if there's too little coordination.