alt Hacker News> Most quality software I’ve seen usually starts from a small subset for the cycle and then incrementally add to it. LLM projects usually rush the building part and do too big of a job and it’s become cumbersome to design (sunken cost) and evaluate (too many variables). If you want to build shelters, you start with a small hut, not with a cathedral.
What on earth makes you think that you can't adopt this exact approach with agentic coding??
This is like saying that you shouldn't drive a car around suburban streets, because the maximum speed it can do is in excess of 250 kph. You absolutely can (and arguably should) take agentic coding slow and steady, and build software the way you always did. Like using a car to get to the shops at 50 kph, you'll still get there much faster than if you walk.
> What on earth makes you think that you can't adopt this exact approach with agentic coding??
It can be done, but it’s not where the hype and the practice is. It’s all about number of commits, number of PR, churns in LoC, which has no bearing on software quality and usefulness.
Something like caddy[0] is just 2700+ commits over 7 years. That’s like 32 commits a month in average. Even if you apply an exponential decay (going from greenfield to mature project), the latter years would have been way peaceful. I know AI can help in some cases, but is it such a pressing need. That would been like taking a car to go somewhere less than 10m away.
Most (mature) open source projects progress a few changes at a time. Most of the time is about ensuring that nothing breaks due to the change.
[0] https://gitlab.com/caddy/caddy