alt Hacker NewsRight, and those of us who advocate for a sensible approach to agentic engineering don't talk about 10x productivity gains or one-shotting entire new (production-ready) features from scratch either.
I remain unconvinced by the "faster to write it by hand than read it" arguments though. My experience throughout my career is that most people, myself included, top out at a couple of hundred lines of tested, production-ready code per day. I can productively review a couple of thousand.
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FEELmyAGI • today at 2:12 AM
"top out at a couple of hundred lines of tested, production-ready code per day" + " productively review a couple of thousand." + LLM agents that write code for you = apparent contradiction with your first paragraph.
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BTW the last day. I played with Claude to fix the simple things all by himself. Sadly we are on gitlab so I needed to tell him to use glab cli and I needed a little bit more time to setup than GitHub (why do they not support gitlab or other code forges…) However it is definitely a time saver in these 1-3 line changes. My workflow basically was:
Let the LLM cook by doing the issues one by one. In the meantime I could start reviewing them. Checkout, running, reading. It was definitely faster since it also correctly linked everything, etc. of course once the change goes beyond that it probably is not working. However I really thought that a good idea would be to check for that work and implement it according to the issue description and change a Mr once the description changes, at least as long as the Mr is 1-3 lines. And even if it does not work, I can just discard it.
(A lot of these problems are often typos that do not even need a checkout, they come in through bigger Mrs that should not be blocked because of them)