alt Hacker News> Why aren't you guiding your LLM usage? Is that what I said - to spam it and not guide anything? Or to have a careful workflow where you agree on design and maximize your human judgement/leverage?
You didn't say anything positively or negatively regarding this so I made an assumption that you were using the LLM relatively unguided (e.g. a bit of oversight, not the kind of thing that heavy code reviews used to involve pre-agents.) Feel free to add clarity on your actual usage loop.
> As opposed to before, when engineers perfectly reasoned about code behavior from first principals and QA was unnecessary?
In my experience, most engineers are quite good at reasoning about code behavior for non-QAed code paths. Obviously things fall through the cracks. But I've been in the ground floor of plenty of Big Techs in their early stages before agents and, yes, a lot of initial development had spotty test coverage and yet most of the engineers had good mental models of what was happening. It used to be a very valuable skill to wrap your head around a torrid piece of code with few or no tests but was nonetheless a core piece of your application. Conversely, agentic development can bring cognitive debt [1].
===
This isn't a fight. We aren't sparring over what's right and wrong. I'm just curious how other people use agents in their work as someone who is also now in a startup that uses LLM agents heavily and has no limitations on spend.
> You didn't say anything positively or negatively regarding this so I made an assumption that you were using the LLM relatively unguided
I feel like this statement betrays your lack of advanced experience coding with LLMs.
OP's elaboration of the steps they are going through (planning, agreeing on plan, getting one LLM to draft execution plan, approving it, then executing with a separate LLM, then reviewing/testing) made it super obvious to me that they are guiding their LLMs quite considerably as part of their work.
Anyone making blanket statements about LLMs producing garbage is just telling on themselves about not having proper SDLC practices in place.