zlacker

The moment all code is interacted with through agents I cease to care about code quality. The only thing that matters is the quality of the product, cost of maintenance etc. exactly the thing we measure software development orgs against. It could be handy to have these projects deployed to demonstrate their utility and efficacy? Looking at PRs of agents feels a wrong headed, like who cares if agents code is hard to read if agents are managing the code base?

>>tired_+(OP)
This is how we wound up with non-technical "engineering managers." Looks good to me.

>>tired_+(OP)
> Looking at PRs of agents feels a wrong headed

It would be walking the motorcycle.

>>tired_+(OP)
You could look at agents as meta-compilers, the problem is that unlike real compilers they aren't verified in any way (neither formally or informally), in fact you never know which particular agent you're running against when you're asking for something; and unlike compilers, you don't just throw away everything and start afresh on each run. I don't think you could test a reasonably complex system to a degree where it really wouldn't matter what runs underneath, and as you're going to (probably) use other agents to write THOSE tests, what makes you certain they offer real coverage? It's turtles all the way down.

>>flying+09
Completely agree and great points. The conclusion of "agents are writing the tests" etc is where I'm at as well. More over the code quality itself is also an agentic problem, as is compile time, reliability, portability... Turtles all the way down as you say.

All code interactions all happen through agents.

I suppose the question is if the agents only produce Swiss cheese solutions at scale and there's no way to fill in those gaps (at scale). Then yeah fully agentic coding is probably a pipe dream.

On the other hand if you can stand up a code generation machine where it's watts + Gpus + time => software products. Then well... It's only a matter of time until app stores entirely disappear or get really weird. It's hard to fathom the change that's coming to our profession in this world.

>>icedch+T3
I think this misses the point, see the other comments. Fully scaled agentic coding replaces managers too :) cause for celebration all around

>>tired_+(OP)
You should at least read the tests, to make sure they express your intent. Personally, I'm not going to take responsibility for a piece of code unless I've read every line of it and thought hard about whether it does what I think it does.

AI coding agents are still a huge force-multiplier if you take this approach, though.

>>tired_+Kb
I don't believe that. If you go fully agentic and you don't understand the output, you become the manager. You're in no better position than the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.

>>tired_+(OP)
We don't read the binary output of our C compilers because we trust it to be correct almost every time. ("It's a compiler bug" is more of a joke than a real issue)

If AI could reach the point where we actually trusted the output, then we might stop checking it.

>>qingch+bI
“If” doing a lot of work here

>>tired_+Kb
No, it becomes only managers, because they are the ones who dictate the business needs (because otherwise, what is the software the agents are making even doing without such goals), and now even worse with non technical ones.

>>qingch+bI
> "It's a compiler bug" is more of a joke than a real issue

It's a very real issue, people just seem to assume their code is wrong rather than the compiler. I've personally reported 12 GCC bugs over the last 2 years and there's 1239 open wrong-code bugs currently.

Here's an example of a simple one in the C frontend that has existed since GCC 4.7: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=105180

>>icedch+Eu
Hey just wanted to thank you for the healthy back and forth! I respect your opinion and don't hold mine strongly. That said I'm eager for this space to mature and for us all to figure out the best way to interact with fault prone code generation tooling... Especially at scale where we all have the hardest time navigating complexity.

>>tired_+4U2
Thanks. It's fun chatting about this stuff! I don't hold mine strongly, either, though I am dealing with lots of AI generated slop code from others.

Interesting times ahead.

>>icedch+Ox3
I feel for you. Hopefully your colleagues come around and realize that if they submit the code they are responsible for the slop.