I'm actively watching understanding slip away from developers, code review getting paired down to no comment checkmarks, and codebases go to bloated messes that nobody can read. Axioms like engineers must understand and take responsibility for the code they ship are getting torn down, and the products coming out are reflecting conway's law, becoming impenetrably obtuse and always "so complex there are no obvious deficiencies" (as opposed to "so simple there are no obvious deficiencies" which used to be the aim).
The one thing plan mode helped is for the humans to get an understanding of the strategy, and be able to poke around and look at the design and architecture. You can achieve this with some self discipline and keeping shorter leashes on agents, but it feels like a losing battle. The best devs still put out good code, but the poor devs are learning nothing while their metrics look great. I can't help but think we are racking up immense amounts of debt that will very soon become due.
This has been the experience of everyone making decisions in any company without being the one doing the technical work. It's not a novel concept. It's actually the opposite, compared to technical people running companies.
Well they had actual people who understood the code - because they wrote it and had a mental model pretty deep. Now the people owning the code don't understand it.
Won't you be worried if your mechanic didn't understand your car but offloaded it to a robot that made mistakes all the time?
taurath · · focus · HN ↗
The one thing plan mode helped is for the humans to get an understanding of the strategy, and be able to poke around and look at the design and architecture. You can achieve this with some self discipline and keeping shorter leashes on agents, but it feels like a losing battle. The best devs still put out good code, but the poor devs are learning nothing while their metrics look great. I can't help but think we are racking up immense amounts of debt that will very soon become due.
gonzalohm · · focus · HN ↗
jstummbillig · · focus · HN ↗
noisy_boy · · focus · HN ↗
Won't you be worried if your mechanic didn't understand your car but offloaded it to a robot that made mistakes all the time?