alt Hacker NewsI get this question a lot, and I found it hard to answer briefly, so I ended up writing a longer post about how I work:
https://www.trigosec.com/insights/mob-programming-for-one/
The short version is that I don’t let AI agents work unsupervised on my code. I treat them like participants in a mob programming session instead of autonomous developers. Different agents get different roles (implementer, reviewer, architect, security reviewer, etc.), and I stay involved throughout the process.
I also agree with your point about architecture. Generating isolated components is relatively easy; preserving and evolving the architectural boundaries across a larger codebase is much harder.
We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality. Until then, architecture heavy work requires much closer supervision than implementation heavy work
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> The short version is that I don’t let AI agents work unsupervised on my code. I treat them like participants in a mob programming session instead of autonomous developers.
I wonder if OS maintainers would have a leg up in defining workflows to better leverage this. Of course, OS contributors are autonomous developers, but maybe a trick or two might transfer across
> We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality
Architectural complexity[1]! There’s several really good papers on this.
Unfortunately it never caught on and we don’t have great automated tools to spit out a number. Also the majority of people just don’t care enough. Research in this field kinda died out when we invented microservices and started treating those as a silver bullet to The Architecture Problem (it’s not [2])
[1] https://swizec.com/blog/why-taming-architectural-complexity-...
[2] https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ