alt Hacker News> A messy codebase is still cheaper to send ten agents through than to staff a team around. And even if the agents need ten days to reason through an unfamiliar system, that is still faster and cheaper than most development teams operating today.
I’ve been on 2 failed projects that have been entirely AI generated and it’s not that agents slow down and you can just send more agents to work on projects for longer, it’s that they becoming completely unable to make any progress whatsoever, and whatever progress they do make is wrong.
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>I’ve been on 2 failed projects that have been entirely AI generated and it’s not that agents slow down and you can just send more agents to work on projects for longer, it’s that they becoming completely unable to make any progress whatsoever, and whatever progress they do make is wrong.
This rhymes a lot with the Mythical Man Month. There's some corollary Mythical Machine Month thing going on with agent developed code at the moment.
Any chance of a blog post covering what you saw?
The more I work with AIs (I build AI harnessing tools), the more I see similarities between the common attention failures that humans make. I forgot this one thing and it fucks everything up, or you just told me but I have too much in my mind as context that I forget that piece, or even in the case of Claude last night attesting to me while I am ordering it around that it cannot SSH into another server but I find it SSHing into said server about the 5th time I come back with traceback and it just fixes it!
All of these things human do, and i don't think we can attribute it directly to language itself, its attention and context and we both have the same issues.
this is the part of the article that I did not sit well with me either. Code is agent generated, agent can debug it but will alway be human owned.
unless anthropic tomorrow comes in and takes ownership all the code claude generates, that is not changing..
Very much like humans when they drown in technical debt. I think the idea that a messy codebase can be magically fixed is laughable.
What I might believe though is that agents might make rewrites a lot more easy.
“Now we know what we were trying to build - let’s do it properly this time!”
Is there a case for having more encapsulation? So a class and tests are defined and the LLM only works on that.
Agents run fast. Not always in the right direction. They benefit from a steady hand.
Same here. I have now deleted 43k and counting lines of my codebase. There is no point in putting any AI code into production anymore as it almost always uses none or the wrong abstractions.
When you try to throw more agents at the problem or even more verification layer, you just kill your agility even if they would still be able to work