Comment by tired_and_awake
3 days ago
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?
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.
> "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
“If” doing a lot of work here
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.
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.
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.
> Looking at PRs of agents feels a wrong headed
It would be walking the motorcycle.
This is how we wound up with non-technical "engineering managers." Looks good to me.
I think this misses the point, see the other comments. Fully scaled agentic coding replaces managers too :) cause for celebration all around
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.
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.
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