[bunderbunder]

I’m seeing it slightly differently. So much of our new slowdown is rework because we’ve seen a bunch more API and contract churn. The project I’m on has had more rework than I care to contemplate and most of it stems from everyone’s coding agents failing to stay synced up with each other on the details and their human handlers not noticing the discrepancies until we’re well into systems integration work.

If I may hijack your analogy, it would be like if all the construction crews got really fast at their work, so much so that the city decided to go for an “iterative construction” strategy because, in isolation, the cost of one team trying different designs on-site until they hit on one they liked became very small compared to the cost of getting city planners and civil engineers involved up-front. But what wasn’t considered was the rework multiplier effect that comes into play when the people building the water, sewage, electricity, telephones, roads, etc. are all repeatedly tweaking designs with minimal coordination amongst each other. So then those tweaks keep inducing additional design tweaks and rework on adjacent contractors because none of these design changes happen in a vacuum. Next thing you know all the houses are built but now need to be rewired because the electricity panel is designed for a different mains voltage from the drop and also it’s in the wrong part of the house because of a late change from overhead lines in the alleys to underground lines below the street.

Many have observed that coding agents lack object permanence so keeping them on a coherent plan requires giving them such a thoroughly documented plan up front. It actually has me wondering if optimal coding agent usage at scale resembles something of a return to waterfall (probably in more of a Royce sense than the bogeyman agile evangelists derived from the original idea) where the humans on the team mostly spend their time banging out systems specifications and testing protocols, and iteration on the spec becomes somewhat more removed from implementing it than it is in typical practice nowadays.