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).
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.
Because even if the rewrite worked, and worked perfectly, you've (a) lost a day, and (b) there's no guarantee that you won't have to do that all over again in a few days' time, because you're still not thinking about the architecture.
But if the codebase is large enough, and if you don't have tests for everything, you'll likely lose stuff along the way. So you'll then spend at least another day tidying up the rewrite, just getting it back to where you were two days ago.
Does that sound like fun? Wouldn't it be easier to just plan it correctly the first time?
trwhite · · focus · HN ↗
NotGMan · · focus · HN ↗
The agent can rewrite half your codebase in one day, so architecture stops mattering for the most part.
epihelix · · focus · HN ↗
But if the codebase is large enough, and if you don't have tests for everything, you'll likely lose stuff along the way. So you'll then spend at least another day tidying up the rewrite, just getting it back to where you were two days ago.
Does that sound like fun? Wouldn't it be easier to just plan it correctly the first time?