Honest take: I work less now with maybe slightly faster results while the output quality is probably about the same. Some bugs sometimes fall through, but when hasn’t that been the case?
I take effort to write specs for the agent and I take effort reading PR’s but thats maybe an hour of work. Obviously there are meetings, sometimes tasks require more planning, sometimes I investigate production problems/data more manually, but overall - I feel I work less after agents became a thing. Kind of ashamed of it tbh.
I feel the 1M context is way too large —- the model gets ”drunk” way before it gets anywhere near 1 million. Imo the 1M context window is a huge downgrade.
I suspect people with opinions like the author’s haven’t been in a project where people use LLMs responsibly. We had a senior dev basically just prompt and push, with very little overseeing and minimal instructions, causing so many bad PRs and even prod bugs. That made me a sceptic for many months about agents.
Then we started to have (myself included) people actual plan out the tasks for the bot: give good specs, good ac, file context, better self-review, better ”agentic practices” (i.e. asking it to review it own work can sometimes help), and suddenly I noticed you really can use agents in a real world 1mil LOC project. If you do it well and responsibly (also meaning you still retain some sense of ownership and actually review the shit)
I use LLM’s daily and agents occasionally. They are useful, but there is no need to move any goal posts; they easily do shit work still in 2026.
All my coworkers use agents extensively in the backend and the amount of shit code, bad tests and bugs has skyrocketed.
Couple that with a domain (medicine) where our customer in some cases needs to validate the application’s behaviour extensively and it’s a fucking disaster —- very expensive iteration instead of doing it well upfront.
What I’ve seen also happen is senior devs suddenly starting to put out garbage code and PRs. One senior dev in our project has become a menace and the quality of his work has dramatically dropped.
Those lazy employees need that strict supervision!
Maybe these c suites and other employee hating assholes are projecting their own lazyness. Or maybe they think they are so superior compared to ”common” people that the ”common” people must be lazy trash.
I don’t know, but it is weird to assume most people won’t do their job without ”strict supervision”. Like super weird.
(Btw, anecdotally, most people I know work more efficiently from home with fewer breaks)
Since you are only willing to go for 1:1 odds with a 3 year timeframe, I assume you are in agreement that it might happen? Otherwise I’m sure you would give him better odds with a larger timeframe :)
Mikko Hyppönen, who holds at least some level of authority on the subject, just recently said in an interview that he believes currently the defenders have the advantage. He claimed there’s currently zero known large incidents where the attackers have been known to utilize LLMs. (Apart from social hacking.)
To be fair, he also said that the defenders having the advantage is going to change.
I take effort to write specs for the agent and I take effort reading PR’s but thats maybe an hour of work. Obviously there are meetings, sometimes tasks require more planning, sometimes I investigate production problems/data more manually, but overall - I feel I work less after agents became a thing. Kind of ashamed of it tbh.