← Back to context

Comment by germanptr

2 days ago

I get this question a lot, and I found it hard to answer briefly, so I ended up writing a longer post about how I work:

https://www.trigosec.com/insights/mob-programming-for-one/

The short version is that I don’t let AI agents work unsupervised on my code. I treat them like participants in a mob programming session instead of autonomous developers. Different agents get different roles (implementer, reviewer, architect, security reviewer, etc.), and I stay involved throughout the process.

I also agree with your point about architecture. Generating isolated components is relatively easy; preserving and evolving the architectural boundaries across a larger codebase is much harder.

We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality. Until then, architecture heavy work requires much closer supervision than implementation heavy work

6 comments

germanptr

Reply
Swizec  2 days ago

> We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality

Architectural complexity[1]! There’s several really good papers on this.

Unfortunately it never caught on and we don’t have great automated tools to spit out a number. Also the majority of people just don’t care enough. Research in this field kinda died out when we invented microservices and started treating those as a silver bullet to The Architecture Problem (it’s not [2])

[1] https://swizec.com/blog/why-taming-architectural-complexity-...

[2] https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ

  • iot_devs  1 day ago

    > Also the majority of people just don’t care enough.

    Yet! It is the next frontier and we will need it for having agent as described in the post to really work

    • Swizec  1 day ago

      > Yet! It is the next frontier

      While researching my book I read papers from the 80’s saying this. If you get a good enough spec and define the contracts and architecture, you then just hand off implementation to juniors/offshore/etc

      So far has not worked. Maybe this time!

      1 reply →

vslira  2 days ago

> The short version is that I don’t let AI agents work unsupervised on my code. I treat them like participants in a mob programming session instead of autonomous developers.

I wonder if OS maintainers would have a leg up in defining workflows to better leverage this. Of course, OS contributors are autonomous developers, but maybe a trick or two might transfer across