Comment by joshblack1982

I'd push back on the use of the term "good developers" here. Since the beginning of software development, software developers have had to adapt to ever changing technologies. The good ones adapt, and the bad ones fall off. A person could say that they were great at writing assembly back in the 70s or 80s, but almost nobody writes straight assembly nowadays, and if they do it's usually written as inline assembly. The environment has once again changed, and agentic coding is the change. The actual good developers will use coding agents to complement their skills and write better code faster, while the ones who can't use or refuse to use coding agents will fall off.

Also the article mentions "senior engineers", the term "senior" is thrown around so much these days — along with the term "engineer" — that it's beginning to lose all meaning. Everyone is a senior after 2 years of software development it seems. Honestly if a group of "senior" "engineers" and infrastructure consultants couldn't get an application working in a week with agents behind their back, I would doubt their expertise. Maybe that airline application is super complicated, but it looks like they let the agents run hog wild without any oversight, which no shit they didn't get a working application in a week. Anyone who has used agents for coding knows you can't do that and expect good results for anything more than a toy application. Also I didn't see a mention of which agents they used, they are far from equal. They could be using Claude Haiku on low effort for all I know.

I think this experiment would have been more interesting with 3 teams: One team with no agents allowed, one team who do full on vibecoding like it seems in this article, and the last which uses agents to complement developers.