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You can work the way you want to work. In my experience, letting the agent make every decision leads to a big ball of mud that requires touching dozens of files to make a change. More context is needed, it burns through tokens much faster, and the agent takes shortcuts and builds technical debt. So the way I prefer to work is to have changes targeted to a single file or small set of files where I've defined the API. Maybe that will change in the future, I'm not set in stone here.

by zmmmmm1 hours ago|

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> In my experience, letting the agent make every decision leads to a big ball of mud that requires touching dozens of files to make a change

It seems too early to make any conclusion like that. We've still only been doing agentic coding for a year and capability significantly improved during that time. I don't think anybody on either side of this debate can have actual empirical evidence to support conclusions about where it lands longer term.

The main argument I see is that it probably pays to be slightly conservative because the cost of being wrong by maintaining too much oversight and shipping slightly less code is better than the cost of ending up with an entirely unmaintainable system. In some cases it will be more than "slightly less" but in almost all complex pre-existing systems, you are rate limited by a lot of other factors outside of code production, so the effective difference just isn't that high.

by solidasparagus4 minutes ago|

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At agentic coding velocity, tech debt becomes obvious much more quickly. Empirical evidence is a bit of a ridiculous bar to hold for software development - we are as quantitatively blind now as we have ever been - but at least for me the anecdotal evidence is very clear. Today's agents hill-climb and their software architecture is pretty reliably bad without a human in the loop.

And it's debatable how much better they will get quickly. Verifiable rewards for maintainability of software is, I think, possible but very hard.

by fasterik49 minutes ago|

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When I said "in my experience" I meant literally that, my experience so far. I'm not making any predictions. I'm definitely anticipating things improving at a rapid pace, which is why I think it's good to run frequent experiments. If in a month I find that an agent can one-shot a 20k line project without creating an unreadable, unmaintainable mess, that will be great.

by NorwegianDude7 minutes ago|

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To be fair, if LLMs were good at decisions, we would not need people.

by jonplackett1 hours ago|

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What still is true for all fields of LLMs: if you can’t tell they do it suboptimally, you are just not that knowledgable in that area.

It still applies to all things LLms can do from law to code to art to ideas.

They can do it - and very acceptably - but only to the untrained eye.