The article is correct to emphasize the importance of definition and that this can be a bottleneck. But it is incorrect to show the layered documentation and development lines taking just as long as they did pre-coding-agents.
Our team is coding much much faster at high quality then we were before coding agents. As this commenter says, if you empower individuals and small teams to define, document and they set up good practices and harnesses, they can accelerate dramatically.
Well said. It is so much better for when the human can see what the LLM has changed and iterate on it with the LLM, making their own changes. Markdown is better for that.
I kind of felt the same way reading the article! It felt so unusual to encounter someone who is both smart and humble and willing to admit they were learning. And I was happy to encounter it and sad that I was so surprised by it.
Congratulations! I think that a lot of the value will be in the judgement of the maintainer about the marginal next feature (and saying no to all those other features) ... if software is a stream then the value is in what gets into the stream. That is an AI resistant value and if you can provide it for your project.
What an excellent article by a smart, humble, still-learning person!
Favorite quote:" There are a whole bunch of reasons I’m not scared that my career as a software engineer is over now that computers can write their own code, partly because these things are amplifiers of existing experience. If you know what you’re doing, you can run so much faster with them. [...]
I’m constantly reminded as I work with these tools how hard the thing that we do is. Producing software is a ferociously difficult thing to do. And you could give me all of the AI tools in the world and what we’re trying to achieve here is still really difficult. [...]"
Consider Nimbalyst, its a free visual workspace for Claude Code and Codex that has visual editing of markdown, mockups, diagrams, code with your agents with WYSYWIG diffs as well as task management and kanban session management tied into your agents. Its got a files/plan/editing mode and an agent/sessions mode.
I'm concerned about these laws and their implications for privacy, but as a parent, I'm not sure what you mean to say parents should parent. How? What should the parent do? How would you recommend a parent protect a 13 year old who spends their time in their room and out with their friends on their phones?
Thanks for sharing. I appreciated getting different perspectives. I come down on ultimately this is lying and I don't see how lying to oneself is going to be helpful.