Comment by dools
8 hours ago
I dunno, I've built a production billing system for my small telecom company, a first version of a Multiplatform app with some novel technical features, and multiple internal tools for a company I work for, which replace a bunch of tools that were strung together using various off the shelf tools. I've been working with agents for about a year. I haven't noticed any cognitive or comprehension decline. I've built things that would have taken a team of offshore devs multiple months on my own in 4 - 6 weeks, including my own coding agent harness which runs an LLM gateway and has mobile, desktop and web apps which is now in use by non-technical colleagues to build and maintain apps on the same platform.
I don't know any more about KMP, Kotlin, Compose, Bash or React than I did a year ago. I'm not that familiar with any of those technologies (well, I am pretty familiar with bash but not to the level at which it's coded by agents), and I have never run into a situation where I felt like it would be better or faster for me to learn them and go hunting through the code to find some problem or other.
Maybe I'm heading towards a cliff somewhere in the future, but based on my experience of building software for 20+ years I'm not feeling anything but optimism so far.
Fair, but based on your experience surely you would agree that 1 year is not really enough time to start seeing codebase design issues from accumulated cruft, misaligned intents and other maintainability issues, this app is still in the honeymoon phase.
Haha I’ve seen apps that never got RELEASED because of code base design issues. As I said maybe there’s a cliff somewhere but I’ve managed enough teams where I wasn’t reading the code to have an understanding of what unsalvagable looks like. I’m not seeing any red flags!