The "junior dev" analogy is the one I keep coming back to, but the part people miss is the review surface area problem. When a human junior writes code, they leave breadcrumbs of their thinking — commit messages, PR descriptions, comments explaining why they chose approach A over B. You can reconstruct their reasoning from the artifact trail. Agents don't do this naturally. You get a diff with no context for why it w…
Beyond agentic coding
61–70 of 96 posts
Re: Beyond agentic coding
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
You still have to synchronize with your code reviewers and teammates, so how well you work together in a team becomes a limiting factor at some point then I guess.
Yes, and that constraint shows up surprisingly early. Even if you eliminate model latency and keep yourself fully in sync via a tight human-in-the-loop workflow, the shared mental model of the team still advances at human speed. Code review, design discussion, and trust-building are all bandwidth-limited in ways that do not benefit much from faster generation. There is also an asymmetry: local flow can be optimized a…
Re: Beyond agentic coding
#63I did a bit of digging into why you think agentic coding is “not there yet”, and I think you are bashing a tool you have very little experience with and are using a bit wrongly. Nothing wrong with that, except that as opposed to any other tool that is out there, agentic coding is approached by smart senior engineers that would otherwise spend time reading documentation and understanding a new package/tool/framework b…
I always wonder what the purpose of posting these generic, superficial defenses of a certain form of LLM-based coding is?
Re: Beyond agentic coding
#64Re: Beyond agentic coding
#65I wonder if the problem of idle time / waiting / breaking flow is a function of the slowness. That would be simple to test, because there are super fast 1000 tok/s providers now. (Waiting for Cerebras coding plan to stop being sold out ;) I've used them for smaller tasks (making small edits), and the "realtime" aspect of it does provide a qualitative difference. It stops being async and becomes interactive. A suffici…
> That said, the main issue I find with agentic is my mental model getting desynchronized. No matter how fast the models get, it takes a fixed amount of time for me to catch up and understand what they've done. This is why I'm so skeptical of anyone running 6+ Claude sessions at a time. I've gotten to 5 but really that was across 3 sessions with 2 standing by just to commit stuff. And even with just 3 sessions I cons…
Re: Beyond agentic coding
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
You still have to synchronize with your code reviewers and teammates, so how well you work together in a team becomes a limiting factor at some point then I guess.
Yes, and that constraint shows up surprisingly early. Even if you eliminate model latency and keep yourself fully in sync via a tight human-in-the-loop workflow, the shared mental model of the team still advances at human speed. Code review, design discussion, and trust-building are all bandwidth-limited in ways that do not benefit much from faster generation. There is also an asymmetry: local flow can be optimized a…
With a good modern setup, everyone can be that "productive", and the only thing that keeps a project coherent is if the original design holds, therefore making rearchitecture a very rare event. It will also push us to have smaller teams in general, just because the idea of anyone managing a project with, say, 8 developers writing a codebase at full speed seems impossible, just like it was when we added enough high performance, talented people to a project. It's just harder to keep coherence.
You can see this risk mentioned in The Mythical Man Month already. The idea of "The Surgery Team", where in practice you only have a couple of people truly owning a codebase, and most of the work we used to hand juniors just being done via AI. It'd be quite funny if the way we have to change our team organization moves towards old recommendations.
Re: Beyond agentic coding
#67> You could take an editor session, a diff, or a pull request and automatically split it into a series of more focused commits that are easier for people to review. This is one of the cases where the AI can reduce human review labor I feel this should be a bigger focus than it is. All the AI code review start up are mostly doing “hands off” code review. It’s just an agent reviewing everything. Why not have an agent c…
Re: Beyond agentic coding
#68> You could take an editor session, a diff, or a pull request and automatically split it into a series of more focused commits that are easier for people to review. This is one of the cases where the AI can reduce human review labor I feel this should be a bigger focus than it is. All the AI code review start up are mostly doing “hands off” code review. It’s just an agent reviewing everything. Why not have an agent c…
Re: Beyond agentic coding
#69- Break down big problems into smaller ones
- Create extensive plan + documentation (context)
- Make sure some parts of the plan if possible can be done simultaneously and not create too many dependencies.
- Define success criteria (tests?)
Then just unleash the agents. The more you put in, the more you get out.
Re: Beyond agentic coding
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and that constraint shows up surprisingly early. Even if you eliminate model latency and keep yourself fully in sync via a tight human-in-the-loop workflow, the shared mental model of the team still advances at human speed. Code review, design discussion, and trust-building are all bandwidth-limited in ways that do not benefit much from faster generation. There is also an asymmetry: local flow can be optimized a…
This thread seems to have re-identified Amdahl’s law in the context of software development workflow. Agentic coding is only speeding up or parallelising a small part of the workflow - the rest is still sequential and human-driven.