[pan69]

I'd consider myself a very experienced (~30 years), but mediocre dev, and this AI thing has completely transformed my capabilities as a software developer. People compare AI to a "smart junior" or something like it. To me, it's more the mentor I never had. When I have AI review code that I wrote, I will point out things I would either have never thought of, or would have taken me weeks or months of going back and forth to figure out. There are lots of things in software development that I hate doing, such as CSS/HTML, AI is now filling the gap that used to be an obstacle for me. With AI this now has become fun as it feels like I am not alone working on this thing. What it produces, I can understand and I review its work as well as vica-verca. I mostly use it in assistant mode. I do not have an army of agents running (yet).

[mycall]

I don't know how people steer multiple agent sessions in parallel. The constant cognitive switching is exhausting and you miss moments unless you are cli jumping. It is like being an operator.

[jbloggs777]

It would be exhausting, if it were always necessary. If you spend the time up-front to properly define goals and requirements in a machine+LLM verifiable way, then the agents can manage it in isolation or with minimal oversight, and present a working result that meets those criteria.

BUT: How many people do you know who can achieve sufficient clarity up front? It is a skill (or set of skills) that needs developing. It can also mean the difference between spending $20 in tokens versus $2000, and/or throwing away the result and starting from scratch again (you don't really want to touch an AI generated codebase with fundamental design flaws if you value your time and sanity)

In the meantime, deliberate checkpoints for human review are still a good idea.

My theory: behind every "10x AI coder" is a long trail of expensive failures that never made the light of day, but which they are learning from. The early adopters will therefore have a competitive advantage.

[pan69]

I have been thinking about this and I think it might work well for established code bases that already exhibit specific patterns that are used over and over again. E.g. a CRUD app with a OpenAPI spec, a controller layer, a service layer, a repository layer, or even good old MVC for that matter. With these established patterns it wouldn't be unthinkable to provide an orchestrator agent a set of requirements that are detailed enough for a group of agents to implement, each agent focusing on a different type of task including an Q/A agent. I'd imagine you end up with one or more PRs for you to review and squash & merge when you're happy with it.

Edit: What I mean is that these agents would work autonomously until their task is accomplished. They can ask for clarification if they require it.