Having worked in/with multiple agencies over the years - working with humans who don't care/are pressured to just ship was exactly what he describes.

For example, I collaborated together with an agency that was working on a popular regional banking app. I was on another project with them and at one point decided to check out what they were doing.

It was a clusterfuck, to say the least. Four developers, four different architectures in the same codebase. One doesn't really understand the others, so he just sticks to his part.

The seams between the ownership parts are full of hacks. Concurrency issues are dealt with via hacks, just make things global and poll to check them. Navigation issues were solved by basically just reseting the app back to homescreen. Testing wasn't really a thing, and the tests that were there were mostly broken ages ago, and nobody cared enough to fix them.

Product didn't care much, designers would prototype a feature, then devs would implement it and wait until the backend is done, then fix things because they never really aligned on the specs. Sometimes, there would be no design review or QA and they would just ship, while sometimes the product person would jump in and test something because it's "an important feature".

Then I got asked to collab with them on another project. Huge customer, huge project, existing codebase. The codebase was so bad I just wrote it from scratch. It was Java written like it's C++. Backend was python code, not updated in years, quadratic scaling everywhere. At one point, the inital GET request was taking over 3 minutes. I took a look and ofc, they didn't even use indexes in the DB.

For these environments, AI coding will just scale up the shit they have, but also allow the small amount of people who might care to deal with this mess and fix it up much much faster than they could before.

Idk about that. I work for myself and I cannot stand coding with LLMs. Even if it were faster (I have only noticed slowdowns long term when using them), the experience of arguing with a slot machine is far more stressful and soul-sucking than even the gnarliest bug.

Yes coorporate “ship as fast as possible” is draining, but that doesn’t mean LLC coding isn’t also to blame.

Yeah, body shops existed before AI came around and your job in one of those is literally just to churn through tickets and get them across the board as fast as possible. Pure production line stuff. AI comes in and turns that to 11.

If you're looking for a decent job with even an ounce of creativity then an agency/consultancy shop is rarely the place you want to be and I can't see it getting any better.

We went heavy on AI at my place of work, like many did, but not really to the level of being AI-pilled and orchestrating dozens of agents and shit like that. It's still a force multiplier if you just use AI to walk through something one task at a time and use the spare time in between to collaborate on bigger picture stuff and think a bit beyond the code alone.

It is crazy in agency work now.

Before you used to sometimes having more tech savy customers put out a VB or Delphi click demo over an weekend kind of effort, and then complain why is the delivery so expensive.

Now they do the same with AI agents.

And then people still think their developer jobs are safe.

Pace doesn't matter. Making things customers want does.

This is all going to end very badly--or very well, if you understand this basic rule of markets, which many managerial types don't.