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Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

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Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#221

Post by luodaint »

jackcviers3 wrote: post #111
luodaint wrote: post #92

#10 needs more emphasis than it receives. Cheaper code doesn't automatically lead to good product decisions. Instead of focusing on whether you can build it, the scarcer resource becomes whether you should build it. And most teams lack a clear process for addressing this latter question. Requirements are collected in all sorts of places without ever being prioritized in an organized fashion. This is exacerbated by ch…

For most teams, whether or not you can say no to building something is ambiguous at best, at least if you wish to stay on that team and at that company. It's definitely one of the things that has made me vote with my feet in the past. With agentic coding, the ability to say no is pretty much gone because the perception is that it's just one more parallel thing we can throw an agent at. The thing I see from agentic ad…

That's right, and even more alarming: no one is pushing back, not only the engineers. The leadership team has AI estimates. The product team has AI estimates. Even the engineering team has AI estimates. Everybody says "Ship." So we ship.

What the company lacked was never engineering deliverables; what it really lacked was a prioritization owner who could draw the line. Bad code certainly wasn't the cause of this problem.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#222

Post by tracker1 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103
spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

> Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap. Software to do what, though ?! Coding, maybe 10% of a developers job (Brooks "Silver Bullet" estimates 1/6), was never the bottleneck, and even if you automated that away entirely then you've only reduced development time by 10% (assuming you are not doing human code review etc). I would also argue that software development as a whole (not just the co…

That's kind of the point in GP... everything around the code has improved... the workflows, definitions, documentation, process. I'd say that all of those things are improving and expanding at a rate faster than the improvements in code output, which are also happening at a faster turn around than actual people.

I've said several times that when I use an Agent, I'm getting about 2-4x the value and about 10x the output... the "value" is features landing in code and the difference to the 10x is documentation and testing. While a lot of that may not get reviewed by every person that touches a product, it helps with further ai based feature development.

I'm not a big fan of running many agents or outright vibe coding slop... but you can definitely leverage the coding agents and get a lot of improved output.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#224

Post by glial »

banannaise wrote: post #163
spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

The ticket has subtle errors in its description that are only caught by someone experienced with the codebase. The code hides an exception behind an if-then-else that defaults to the most common state, which isn't caught until it breaks things for the 1% of users who don't have that state. The new feature quietly breaks a feature not covered by the acceptance tests. The documentation is four times as long and nobody…

Definitely, but the first 3 issues are also created by human co-workers.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#225

Post by onion2k »

spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap.

It won't, because right now we're busy exhausting the vein of good-ideas-we-wanted-to-build, and that's the source of all the good stuff you listed. When that runs out you'll see teams building any old crap because building is cheap, and learning that experimenting by putting any old crap in front of users is a fast way to burn goodwill and brand loyalty.

You still need good ideas and the taste to choose which to put out there over the bad ideas that people actively dislike.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#226

Post by pryelluw »

spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

This better stated as: Use of agents has forced teams to adopt best practices and guide style guides.

Which is my experience. Once you get into the actual development process, the code itself produced by the agents is not good enough. Still needs editing and rewriting.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#227

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

tracker1 wrote: post #222
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap. Software to do what, though ?! Coding, maybe 10% of a developers job (Brooks "Silver Bullet" estimates 1/6), was never the bottleneck, and even if you automated that away entirely then you've only reduced development time by 10% (assuming you are not doing human code review etc). I would also argue that software development as a whole (not just the co…

That's kind of the point in GP... everything around the code has improved... the workflows, definitions, documentation, process. I'd say that all of those things are improving and expanding at a rate faster than the improvements in code output, which are also happening at a faster turn around than actual people. I've said several times that when I use an Agent, I'm getting about 2-4x the value and about 10x the outpu…

I'm not talking about what the developer is doing - I'm talking about what the company is doing in terms of initiating new development work. Again, startups and one-man shops are different because you control your own pace, but in many large corporations you may sit around just minding shop until the next big product development comes along (I would use this time to start my own initiatives to build tools and libraries to help the team), and that company pace is not being determined by how long development takes.

This is especially true if like most developers you are not working at a company where software is the product, but rather where software is part of the product, or where you are part of IT working on internal systems, not part of product development at all.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#228

Post by pryelluw »

tracker1 wrote: post #222
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap. Software to do what, though ?! Coding, maybe 10% of a developers job (Brooks "Silver Bullet" estimates 1/6), was never the bottleneck, and even if you automated that away entirely then you've only reduced development time by 10% (assuming you are not doing human code review etc). I would also argue that software development as a whole (not just the co…

That's kind of the point in GP... everything around the code has improved... the workflows, definitions, documentation, process. I'd say that all of those things are improving and expanding at a rate faster than the improvements in code output, which are also happening at a faster turn around than actual people. I've said several times that when I use an Agent, I'm getting about 2-4x the value and about 10x the outpu…

Then is it a real 10x increase in output if the output is in supporting areas and not the code/feature delivery? It seems like you’re saying that you are now able to maintain documentation at a faster rate and increase testing but not the actual development speed of the feature itself.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#229

Post by LtWorf »

ikrenji wrote: post #193
butlike wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hard dependency like that doesn't seem flexible. There's no such thing as a high-trust environment, abstractly.

there are workplaces that trust their employees to do the right thing to higher and lesser level. places that empower the employees the most will see the highest gains from LLMs

After having a job, I do not trust my coworkers. I might trust a few selected ones, but I certainly do not trust all of them.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#230

Post by pojzon »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103
spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

> Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap. Software to do what, though ?! Coding, maybe 10% of a developers job (Brooks "Silver Bullet" estimates 1/6), was never the bottleneck, and even if you automated that away entirely then you've only reduced development time by 10% (assuming you are not doing human code review etc). I would also argue that software development as a whole (not just the co…

We can all agree that very big portion of the time needed during product engineering is.. syncing progress, requirements, plans, etc etc. And we have to do it over and over due to how big teams are.

Fast forward, fire half of those ppl, for sure fire all middle managers, scrum masters, coaches, wooden-architects.

Suddenly you save up so much time on syncing, you can ship twice as fast.

And NO, quality and impact doesnt go down. It actually goes up.

This is probably something you did not want to hear :)

Few competent ppl with AI are much much much better than dozens of medicore teams.

We need now „Product Builders” and „Product maintainers”. All of the other roles lost value.

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