Comment by pron

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.