If you have a sophisticated agent system that uses multiple forward and backward passes, the quality improves tremendously.
Based on my set up as of today, I’d imagine by sometime next year that will be normal and then the conversation will be very different; mostly around cost control. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a break out popular agent control flow language by next year as well.
The net is that unsupervised AI engineering isn’t really cheaper better or faster than human engineering right now. Does that mean in two years it will be? Possibly.
There will be a lot of optimizations in the message traffic, token uses, foundational models, and also just the Moore’s law of the hardware and energy costs.
But really it’s the sophistication of the agent systems that control quality more than anything. Simply following waterfall (I know, right? Yuck… but it worked) increased code quality tremoundously.
I also gave it the SelfDocumentingCode pattern language that I wrote (on WikiWikiWeb) as a code review agent and quality improved tremendously again.