alt Hacker NewsIn my opinion you are just wrong.
It’s an absolute game changer, and it can now multiply your productivity fivefold if it’s a solo greenfield project.
Maybe half a year ago it was as you said. You had to wait for the agent to finish, you had to review carefully, and often the result was not that great. You did not save a lot of time.
Now I can spin up 3+ parallel conversations in Codex, each in a git worktree. My work is mainly QA testing the features, refining the behavior, and sometimes making architectural decisions.
The results are now undeniable. In the past I could not have developed a product of that scope in my free time.
That is what is possible today. I suspect many engineers have not yet tried things that became feasible over the last months. Like parallel agents, resolving merge conflicts, separating out functionality from a large branch into proper PRs.
Replies
The thing is, I don't care any longer. I sincerely believe velocity without direction is not a good strategy for delivering quality in the long term. And that's the thing about it: How sustainable is this velocity, in terms of socioeconomic concerns, product strategy, and mental health?
All of the "solo green field projects" I let LLMs mostly write, despite supplying the scaffolding, structure and specific implementation details as code, prompts or context, I can't tell you much about 6+ months later, except for the parts I did write.
It's like I never wrote them, because I didn't. I've got the gist of them, but it's the same way I get the gist of something like Numpy: I know how it works theoretically, but certainly not specifically enough to jump in and write some working Fortran that fixes bugs or adds features.
I now have a bunch of stalled projects I'm not very familiar with. I no longer do solo green field projects that way.
> and it can now multiply your productivity fivefold if it’s a solo greenfield project.
Why do I not see 5x as many interesting greenfield projects than before?
> if it’s a solo greenfield project
That's a big if. I don't have numbers but most professional engineers are not working on such projects
"many engineers have not yet tried things that became feasible over the last months"
I have heard this statement every single day for 2 years and yet we still have no companies compressing 10 years into 1 year thus exploding past all the incumbents who don't "get it".