alt Hacker NewsI work at a company with approximately $1 million in revenue per engineer and multiple 10+ year old codebases.
We use agents very aggressively, combined with beads, tons of tests, etc.
You treat them like any developer, and review the code in PRs, provide feedback, have the agents act, and merge when it's good.
We have gained tremendous velocity and have been able to tackle far more out of the backlog that we'd been forced to keep in the icebox before.
This idea of setting the bar at "agents work without code reviews" is nuts.
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Why are you using experience and authoritative framing about a technology we’ve been using for less than 6 months?
> We have gained tremendous velocity and have been able to tackle far more out of the backlog that we'd been forced to keep in the icebox before.
Source? Proofs? It's not the first, second or even third round on this rodeo.
In other words, notto disu shittu agen.
If there is one thing I have seen is that there is a subset of intellectual people will still be adverse to learning new tools, hang to ideological beliefs (I feel this though, watching programming as you know it die in a way, kinda makes you not want to follow it) and would prefer to just be lazy and not properly dogfood and learn their new tooling.
I'm seeing amazing result to with agents, when provided an well formed knowledge base and directed through each piece of work like its a sprint. Review and iron out scope requirements, api surface/contract, have agents create multi phase implementation plans and technical specifications in a share dev directory and to make high quality changes logs, document future consideration and any bugs/issues found that can be deferred. Every phase is addressed with a human code review along with gemini who is great at catching drift from spec and bugs in less obvious places.
While I'm sure an enterprise code base could still be an issue and would require even more direction (and opus I wont let touch java, it codes like an enterprise java greybeard who loves to create an interface/factory for everything), I think that's still just a tooling issues.
I'm not of the super pro AI camp, but having followed its development and used it throughout. For the first time I am actual amazed and bothered, and convinced if people dont embrace these tools, they will be left behind. No they dont 10-100x a jr dev, but if someone has proper domain knowledge to direct the agent, performs dual research with it to iron things out with the human actually understanding the problem space, 2-5x seems quite reasonable currently if driven by a capable developer. But this just move the work to review and documentation maintenance/crafting. Which has its own fatigue and is less rewarding for a programmers mind who loves to solve challenges and gets dopamine from it .
But given how man people are adverse...I dont think anyone who embraces it is going to have job security issues and be replaced, but here are many capable engineers who might due to their own reservations. I'm amazed by how many intelligent and capable people try llms/agents like a political straw man, there is no reasoning with them. They say vibe coding sucks (it does for anything more than a small throw away that wont be maintained), yet their examples for agents/llm not working is it can't just take a prompt and produce the best code ever and automatically and manifest the knowledge needed to work on their codebase. You still need to put in effort and learn to actually perform the engineering with the tools, but if it doesnt take a paragraph with no AGENTS.md and turn it into a feature or bug fix they are not good to them. Yeah they will get distracted and fuck up, just like if you throw 9/10 developers in the same situation and told them to get to work with no knowledge of the code base or domain and have their pr in by noon.