alt Hacker News>This is going to blow up.
We are way past wringing our hands over agentic engineering. Every startup and all fast moving companies are onboard. They don't hand code anymore. There will not be some code quality crisis that will stop everyone in their tracks. I'm trying to cope with this too, but I don't think the best path is praying for failure.
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> I don't think the best path is praying for failure. Embrace it
"Embrace failure" is exactly the attitude every company is going to take. They've already been working at bottoming out our expectations.
We should have been running companies out of business with regulations and abandonment when their human-written software leaked our private data to criminals, or when their untested forced-updates shut down our systems and sent our IT teams scrambling, or when their unoptimized code forced us to upgrade our hardware or negated any performance gains we should have seen from investing in upgrades.
The quality, reliability, and security of the software we all use and depend on is going to nosedive, and companies already know they can get away with it. They aren't going to start caring about how we feel about that now. "Pay more and settle for less" is where we are today. "Embrace Failure" is the future we're sprinting towards.
That's absolutely not true. The places that have embraced "agentic engineering" are mostly garbage factories, and lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. I recognize that most of the people on this site are just trying to self-promote for their own gig, but the level of misinformation is sometimes just staggering.
Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. I’ve heard some true horror stories already from companies who claim they’re doing amazing things with great results. You should be especially on guard if it’s a publicly traded company, selling AI usage is necessary to appease the market (and thereby C-level stock value).
Well nobody has had to pay the tech debt yet on the last 6 months of that insanity. I think the age-old SWE best practices will still hold in time.
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Just out of the popularity of the claim, I’ll bite.
Both big tech and startups are now full of people working at 10x, features are written as fast as PMs can think them, monoliths self heal with agents buzzing over them.
10x means 10 times the outcomes in a given amount of time, so did you see the last iOS version pack a decade worth of features in a single release?
Do you remember when meta moved their backend to rust in a month?
What about Microsoft software not having a single bug in a year?
Yeah, me neither.