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POC, sure (although 10x-ing a POC doesn't actually get you 10x velocity). MVP, though? No way. Today's frontier models are nowhere near smart enough to write a non-trivial product (i.e. something that others are meant to use), minimal or otherwise, without careful supervision. Anthropic weren't able to get agents to write even a usable C compiler (not a huge deal to begin with), even with a practically infeasible amount of preparatory work (write a full spec and a reference implementation, train the model on them as well as on relevant textbooks, write thousands of tests). The agents just make too many critical architectural mistakes that pretty much guarantee you won't be able to evolve the product for long, with or without their help. The software they write has an evolution horizon between zero days and about a year, after which the codebase is effectively bricked.

by andoando16 hours ago|

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There is a million things in between a C compiler and a non-trivial product. They do make a ton of horrible architectural decisions, but I only need to review the output/ask questions to guide that, not review every diff.

by pron15 hours ago|

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A C compiler is a 10-50KLOC job, which the agents bricked in 0 days despite a full spec and thousands of hand-written tests, tests that the software passed until it collapsed beyond saving. Yes, smaller products will survive longer, but how would you know about the time bombs that agents like hiding in their code without looking? When I review the diffs I see things that, if had let in, the codebase would have died in 6-18 months.

BTW, one tip is to look at the size of the codebase. When you see 100KLOC for a first draft of a C compiler, you know something has gone horribly wrong. I would suggest that you at least compare the number of lines the agent produced to what you think the project should take. If it's more than double, the code is in serious, serious trouble. If it's in the <1.5x range, there's a chance it could be saved.

Asking the agent questions is good - as an aid to a review, not as a substitute. The agents lie with a high enough frequency to be a serious problem.

The models don't yet write code anywhere near human quality, so they require much closer supervision than a human programmer.

by sarchertech15 hours ago|

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A C compiler with an existing C compiler as oracle, existing C compilers in the training set, and a formal spec, is already the easiest possible non-trivial product an agent could build without human review.

You could have it build something that takes fewer lines of code, but you aren’t gonna to find much with that level of specification and guardrails.