When we (the engineering team I work on) started using agents more seriously we were worried about this: that we'd speed up coding time but slow down review time and just end up increasing cycle time.
So far there's no obvious change one way or the other, but it hasn't been very long and everyone is in various states of figuring out their new workflows, so I don't think we have enough data for things to average out yet.
We're finding cases where fast coding really does seem to be super helpful though:
* Experimenting with ideas/refactors to see how they'll play out (often the agent can just tell you how it's going to play out)
* Complex tedious replacements (the kind of stuff you can't find/replace because it's contextual)
* Times where the path forward is simple but also a lot of work (tedious stuff)
* Dealing with edge cases after building the happy path
* EDIT: One more huge one I would add: anywhere where the thing you're adding is a complete analogy of another branch/PR the agent seems to do great at (which is like a "simple but tedious" case)
The single biggest potential productivity gain though I think is being able to do something else while the agent is coding, like you can go review a PR and then when you come back check out what the agent produced.
I would say we've gone from being extremely skeptical to cautiously excited. I think it's far fetched that we'll see any order of magnitude differences, we're hoping for 2x (which would be huge!).
Very much agree for the type of software I've worked on my whole career. I've seen way more time and energy wasted by people trying to predict the future than fixing bugs. In practice I think it's common to realize something didn't "possibly work" until after it's already deployed, but keeping things simple makes it easy to fix. So this advice also ends up basically being "move fast break things".
We attempt to address this problem at work with an extra caveat to never add code "in the wrong direction" -- so it's fine (usually preferable) to have a partial implementation, as long as it's heading in the direction we'd like the more complete implementation to go in. Basically "KISS, but no hacks".
So far there's no obvious change one way or the other, but it hasn't been very long and everyone is in various states of figuring out their new workflows, so I don't think we have enough data for things to average out yet.
We're finding cases where fast coding really does seem to be super helpful though:
* Experimenting with ideas/refactors to see how they'll play out (often the agent can just tell you how it's going to play out)
* Complex tedious replacements (the kind of stuff you can't find/replace because it's contextual)
* Times where the path forward is simple but also a lot of work (tedious stuff)
* Dealing with edge cases after building the happy path
* EDIT: One more huge one I would add: anywhere where the thing you're adding is a complete analogy of another branch/PR the agent seems to do great at (which is like a "simple but tedious" case)
The single biggest potential productivity gain though I think is being able to do something else while the agent is coding, like you can go review a PR and then when you come back check out what the agent produced.
I would say we've gone from being extremely skeptical to cautiously excited. I think it's far fetched that we'll see any order of magnitude differences, we're hoping for 2x (which would be huge!).