Thread

1. trwhite · 1790350567 · focus · HN ↗

   I'm really struggling to see how to make architectural decisions with an agent. It's great when you're at a total loss for ideas, but when you already have some of the pieces it ultimately wants to drive all of the thinking and takes over. Then it just feels like you're deferring your experienced judgement. I've seen colleagues lose the ability to reason any more without asking the agent to do it for them, because they inherently don't see the point if the agent is going to end up doing the whole piece (and probably auditing/overruling anything they came up with on their own).

   1. NotGMan · 1790351444 · focus · HN ↗

      Why would you care about architecture? It was an issue when humans were writing code so architecture mattered in the sense that you needed a sweet spot between current requirements and future extensions.

      The agent can rewrite half your codebase in one day, so architecture stops mattering for the most part.

      1. AnimalMuppet · 1790352635 · focus · HN ↗

         Why would you care about architecture? Ability to implement the current feature, ability to implement future features, maintainability, and (at least sometimes) performance.

         But why would you care when an AI can just rewrite it? Yes, but can it rewrite it to a good architecture? Or just to a different one?

         Does a good architecture make code easier for an AI to maintain? I don't know, but I think it's at least not proven that it doesn't.

         1. simonh · 1790354262 · focus · HN ↗

            It’s important for separation of concerns, which is important for maintenance and future iteration on features and bug fixes. If you don’t have separation of concerns, every change to anything is essentially a from scratch rewrite of the whole thing. That’s also incredibly inefficient in token usage.

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