Comment by user34283
2 hours ago
In my opinion you are just wrong.
It’s an absolute game changer, and it can now multiply your productivity fivefold if it’s a solo greenfield project.
Maybe half a year ago it was as you said. You had to wait for the agent to finish, you had to review carefully, and often the result was not that great. You did not save a lot of time.
Now I can spin up 3+ parallel conversations in Codex, each in a git worktree. My work is mainly QA testing the features, refining the behavior, and sometimes making architectural decisions.
The results are now undeniable. In the past I could not have developed a product of that scope in my free time.
That is what is possible today. I suspect many engineers have not yet tried things that became feasible over the last months. Like parallel agents, resolving merge conflicts, separating out functionality from a large branch into proper PRs.
"many engineers have not yet tried things that became feasible over the last months"
I have heard this statement every single day for 2 years and yet we still have no companies compressing 10 years into 1 year thus exploding past all the incumbents who don't "get it".
If you want an example of a project that condensed 5 years into 6 months and exploded past the competition I suggest looking at OpenClaw.
The first line of code was written on November 25th. It achieved adoption in the "personal agents" space that far exceeded the other companies that had tried the same thing.
(Whether or not you trust the quality of the software you can't deny the impact it had in such a short time. It defined a new category of software.)
OpenClaw is definitely not a "5 years" project pre-AI though. That was more like a month of greenfield work compressed into a weekend -- which is still really impressive, don't get me wrong! -- but I think the point is we're not seeing mature, legacy codebases get outcompeted by new, agile, AI-driven codebases; we're seeing greenfield projects get spun up faster. Which, again, is still impressive and valuable.
If agents could really compress 10 years of development into 1 year, you'd see people making e.g. HFT platforms and becoming obscenely rich, not making a fun open-source project and getting hired by OpenAI as an employee.
Ideally, the given example would be something not ajacent to the presently white-hot category of "AI agents".
Like, look at e.g. YC minus the AI and AI ajacent companies. Are those startups meaningfully more impressive or feature-rich as compared to a couple years ago?
Its trash vibecoded markdown files around pi. This exemplifies well what op’is saying. We are at the ICO stage of llms. Hopefully there wont be an nft one
Well, the GP mentioned
> if it’s a solo greenfield project
which is a pretty large caveat. Anecdotally, I've found my side projects (which are solo greenfield projects, and don't need to be supported to the same standards as enterprise software) have gained the boost the GP was talking about.
At work, it's different, since design, review, and maintenance is much more onerous.