This lines up with my experience as well and what you’ve described is very close to how I work with LLM agents. The people bragging about 10x are either blowing smoke or producing garbage. I mean, I guess in some limited contexts I might get 10x out of taking a few seconds to write a prompt vs a couple of minutes of manual hunting and typing. But on the whole, software engineering is about so much more than just coding and those things have become no less important these days.
But the people acting like the tech is a useless glorified Markov generator are also out of their mind. There are some real gains to be had by properly using the tech. Especially once you’ve laid the groundwork by properly documenting things like your architecture and dependencies for LLM consumption. I’m not saying this to try to sell anybody on it but I really, truly, can’t imagine that we’re ever going back to the before times. Maybe there’s a bubble burst like the dotcom bubble but, like the internet, agentic coding is here to stay.
Precisely. I think a big part of maturing as an engineer is being able to see past both the hype and cynicism with new tech and instead understand that everything has strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs, and that some things are also a matter of opinion because software development is an art as much as it is a science. The goal is to have a nuanced understanding the capabilities of each tool in order to use the right tool in the right context, mitigate its weaknesses, and pair it with your own and your team’s strengths, weaknesses, preferences, career goals, etc.
This lines up with my experience as well and what you’ve described is very close to how I work with LLM agents. The people bragging about 10x are either blowing smoke or producing garbage. I mean, I guess in some limited contexts I might get 10x out of taking a few seconds to write a prompt vs a couple of minutes of manual hunting and typing. But on the whole, software engineering is about so much more than just coding and those things have become no less important these days.
But the people acting like the tech is a useless glorified Markov generator are also out of their mind. There are some real gains to be had by properly using the tech. Especially once you’ve laid the groundwork by properly documenting things like your architecture and dependencies for LLM consumption. I’m not saying this to try to sell anybody on it but I really, truly, can’t imagine that we’re ever going back to the before times. Maybe there’s a bubble burst like the dotcom bubble but, like the internet, agentic coding is here to stay.
Precisely. I think a big part of maturing as an engineer is being able to see past both the hype and cynicism with new tech and instead understand that everything has strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs, and that some things are also a matter of opinion because software development is an art as much as it is a science. The goal is to have a nuanced understanding the capabilities of each tool in order to use the right tool in the right context, mitigate its weaknesses, and pair it with your own and your team’s strengths, weaknesses, preferences, career goals, etc.