Comment by sadilek
5 hours ago
Agree. For me, that's exactly what happened. I work with the agents the way I'd work with a team of developers, not the way I use a compiler. Since the end of September, they've made about 970 commits to a project of mine, and I haven't read a line of its code.
And like with a team, many programs could meet what I asked for, but I check the behavior of what they built, not the code directly. I think of it as working on the level of an engineering director, who also doesn't review code directly. Each agent shows me its change running in the app, in a short narrated screen recording, like in a launch review for the director. When it's not what I meant, I say what, and it goes another round.
How do you check, from examining behavior alone, that the code does not contain stuff like this:
if (date == <some random future date>) { crash_and_burn_the_world() }
??
If you are checking every line written by an LLM , what would you estimate is the probability it would ever do this?? I look at most code still and I have a high level of trust that it would never do anything remotely similar to this.
You just get an agent to look for traps.
I actually found code exactly like that would break a test on a certain date, using an agent.
It's really good at flagging things like this, which tend to be leftovers from a human process that nobody has had the time to clean.
How do you do that with a human team? Trust?
"trust" and "responsibility" mean nothing for a fully digital entity who isn't required to feed its family, looking for an eventual new job, and being under pressure for not being fired
If you like being a software tester or director, go ahead with it.
However you can't prevent some other people from working as software developers who write and read code.
Even with cars, you still walk. Even with factories, someone still craft handmade bags.
I can't prevent them, and in fact, I don't want to. Didn't mean to imply that.