alt Hacker NewsI'm a fan of AI coding tools but the trend of adding ever more autonomy to agents confuses me.
The rate at which a person running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly is basically reached with just a single thread with a human in the loop.
Which implies that this is not intended to be used in a setting where people will be reading the code.
Does that... Actually work for anyone? My experience so far with AI tools would have me believe that it's a terrible idea.
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It works for me, in that I don't care about all the intermediate babble ai generates. What matters is the final changelist before hitting commit... going through that, editing it, fixing comments, etc. But holding it's hand while it deals with LSP issues of a logger not being visible sometimes, is just not something I see a reason to waste my time with.
> The rate at which a person running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly is basically reached with just a single thread with a human in the loop.
That's what you're missing -- the key point is, you don't review and comprehend the output! Instead, you run the program and then issue prompts like this (example from simonw): "fix in and get it to compile" [0]. And I'm not ragging on this at all, this is the future of software development.
[0] https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5...
Based on Gas Town, the people doing this agree that they are well beyond an amount of code they can review and comprehend. The difference seems to be they have decided on a system that makes it not a terrible idea in their minds.
No, it doesn't work in practice because they make far too many mistakes.
> running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly
You have to realize this is targeting manager and team lead types who already mostly ignore the details and quality frankly. "Just get it done" basically.
That's fine for some companies looking for market fit or whatever - and a disaster for some other companies now or in future, just like outsourcing and subcontracting can be.
My personal take is: speed of development usually doesn't make that big a difference for real companies. Hurry up and wait, etc.
Yes, this actually works. In 2026, software engineering is going to change a great deal as a result, and if you're not at least experimenting with this stuff to learn what it's capable of, that's a red flag for your career prospects.
I don't mean this in a disparaging way. But we're at a car-meets-horse-and-buggy moment and it's happening really quickly. We all need to at least try driving a car and maybe park the horse in the stable for a few hours.