[mark242]

Title clickbait for sure, but the process has radically changed in the past 6 months due to this new generation of models.

"Perfect code from the agent everytime" isn't really what the expectation is. Bugs are always going to be shipped into production, no matter who or what is writing the code. Where SDLC is really getting compressed is in the iteration phase.

For example:

- "This is a known good state; write tests to enforce this state" is something that takes minutes now instead of days. That is incredibly powerful for understanding and maintaining a system.

- Bugfixing is a matter now of an agent watching error logs, diagnosing traces, and immediately issuing PRs with suggested fixes, something that again would have taken hours at least and is now down to minutes (and can be a 24x7 operation, which for most businesses is a revelation).

- Engineers have the freedom to land enhancements that in the Before Times would have sat in the backlog for months and years on end because of the time commitment. That has knock-on effects of quality, features, and just overall improvements for users.

It is a very, very, very different world that we're operating in, and what used to be huge steps of the SDLC now take less time than checking your email in the mornings with your first cup of coffee.

[georgefrowny]

> This is a known good state; write tests to enforce this state" is something that takes minutes now instead of days.

Pointing the AI agentic SLoC cannon at that sounds like a way to speedrun a set of tests that completely ossify the codebase.

Careless slapping down of tests feels great and looks good in the CI at first but a good test that only tests what it needs to do and leaves flexibility for maneuver is at least as hard to write as the code to start with.

[orwin]

- "This is a known good state; write tests to enforce this state" is something that takes minutes now instead of days. That is incredibly powerful for understanding and maintaining a system.

Not if you don't describe the tests before. AI will generate absolutely useless tests, and since it seems even the latest version have difficulties to generate working test doubles (which i'm _still_ surprised about, but i took 4 hour generating a dogshit test double i could have written in half the time. To me this should be a something AI should be absolutely great at, and it's not), if your test are AI-only, understanding of the underlying system will be hard.

On bugfixing I agree with your message, but disagree on the scope: bugfixing changed for some categories of bugs (most of them tbh), but some will still have you dig deep into the database or the transaction history/monitoring.

On enhancement i agree 100%, i think this is the biggest benefit of AI. Even new hires can land a few enhancement a week without any domain knowledge. Our backlog is almost empth, and only the largest enhancement are up (basically performance improvement)

Sorry i wanted to nitpick, I do that very often when i think i mostly agree with someone except on very specific points.