[–] user43928 4 days ago
[–] senordevnyc 4 days ago
It's worth noting that I also have a lot of guardrails and custom tooling around my own process to check code quality, QA functionality, limit blast radius of bugs, add observability, make deployments and rollbacks quick and low risk, etc.
[–] Seattle3503 4 days ago
I'm not sure if this means we will see smaller and smaller firms as a sort of market darwinism rewards good AI use by solopreneurs, and as large organizations tear themselves apart, or if we see the way big firms hold people accountable for their work change dramatically.
I also wonder what happens to these solo-businesses as they need to hire their second employee. What goes from a personal workflow will need to become a business process. I bet a lot of solo operators will resist employee #2 at nearly every cost!
[–] senordevnyc 4 days ago
[–] Seattle3503 3 days ago
[–] prmph 4 days ago
If you want to provide a good, secure, user-empowering, performant product, you cannot delegate everything agents, I assure you. And, building your foundation on un-reviewed mess of code will come back to bite you (partly depending on how big you grow), the same way it does with humans, which management always think is not an issue until it becomes one.
Now, you don't have to take my word for. Think of this: why is every change to Claude Code making it worse now? It is not almost unusable for me after many regressions over past hew years in its UX. Is it because of a lack of AI being used in its development?
[–] user43928 4 days ago
Because by my estimation we did build our products in such a way and have that experience, while you presumably did not.
As for Claude Code, they recently delivered a significant upgrade to the desktop app where some commented that it felt like they upgraded Opus 5.5 to 5.6.
It's in fact working great, and the days where it was buggy are in my view in the past.
[–] senordevnyc 4 days ago
As for the rest, I assure you that the product is much more performant, secure, and delivers far, far more value to my users than I ever could have done prior to AI-assisted coding. And I'm a staff level engineer with 25 years of coding experience across all kinds of organizations. I'm not the best coder, but I'm at least decent. AI has been a massive force multiplier for me, even as I agree that it's not perfect.
Unpacking a little more, I think the area you might be running into issues with is the idea that because I rarely open my IDE, I'm "delegating everything to agents". I'm really not. I review PRs (just not in my IDE), I steer higher-level abstractions in the broader system. To me, automated coding with a frontier model is definitely good enough that it's utterly pointless of me to read the internals of 99% of functions, even classes. Assuming the inputs are correct, the agents will get those details correct. And for the tiny fraction of the time when that's not the case, that's why we have adversarial review, guardrails, tests, o11y, quick rollbacks, etc, etc. Working at the level of how the broader building blocks of the system fit together, bisecting the software into low / medium / high risk areas so I can direct more of my scarcest resource (my attention) towards the highest ROI portions, and building the infrastructure (the "software factory") that the agents work within building and improving the product is where I can add the most value in November 2026.
Have you ever worked in a bigger tech company with tens of millions of lines of code and senior staff / principal engineers? In my experience, sure they're reading and writing code here and there, but that's not the value they provide. The value they provide is the broader architectural view of the systems and how they fit together. It's no different with AI.
[–] prmph 4 days ago
We may differ in the level of review and steering we do a bit. I have worked in codebases approaching a 1 million LOC, and I am now working on a suite of products and libraries in a monorepo that would be the flagship products of my own small company.
I have defined a strong architecture, guardrails, and a way of working that the agents keep to. I approve almost every single edit they do in the terminal, but most of the time I do not have to read each line, because they are good enough. Every now and then, I catch them doing something egregious, and I correct or redirect them. Other times, they stop to ask me for direction. Still, I am faster and do more work with the help of the agents.
So, no I'm not saying the agents do not provide value; they help with a lot of grunt work, and they can write most code basically correctly. Where I am firmly still in the driver's seat is with architecture, UX, quality control, product invariants and standards, and the occasional tweak to lower level implementation details. These remain a lot of work, unless you are simply building CRUD forms.
This does not sound like "coding is solved". If coding is solved, then I can one-shot a complex software product into being, which is never going to be the case.
Between Opus 5.5 + GPT-6.1 Sol reviewer, most issues and unhandled edge cases are caught during implementation.
Then you QA test and provide the feedback.
I guarantee that this is enough to produce not only a working product, but is well capable of building apps much better than what is out there, without ever looking at the code.
Depending on your product and risk tolerance you may disagree. I believe that for the vast majority of use cases the approach I described, combined with extensive manual testing, is entirely adequate.