I've seen engineers I respect abandon this way of working as a team for the productivity promise of conjuring PRs with a coding agent. It blows away years of trust so quickly when you realize they stopped reviewing their own output.
1. The longer I work in this industry, the more it becomes clear that CxO's aren't great at projecting/planning, and default to copy-cat, herd behaviors when uncertain.
Surely I could do a mediocre job as a CxO by parroting whatever is hot on Linkedin. Probably wouldn't be a massively successful one, but good enough to survive 2 years and have millions in the bank for that, or get fired and get a golden parachute.
(half) joking - most likely I'm massively trivializing the role.
Having worked for a pretty decent CIO of a global business I'd say his main job was to travel about speak to other senior leaders and work out what business problems they had and try and work out, at a very high level, how technology would fit into that addressing those problems.
Just parroting latest technology trends would, I suspect, get you sacked within a few weeks.
If devs are expected to ship 10x faster (or else!), then they will find a way to ship 10x faster.
Ive had metrics rammed down my throat, Ive had AI rammed down my throat, Scrum rammed down my throad and Ive had various other diktats rammed down my throat.
95% of which slowed us down.
The only time ive been asked is when there is a deadline and it's pretty clear we arent going to hit it and even then they're interested in quick wins like "can we bring lunch to you for a few weeks?", not systemic changes.
The fastest and most productive times have been when management just set high level goals and stopped prodding.
Im convinced that the companies which seek developer autonomy will leave the ones which seek to maximize token usage in the dust in the next tech race.
Agents are getting really good, and if you're used to planning and designing up front you can get a ton of value from them. The main problem with them that I see today is people having that level of trust without giving the agent the context necessary to do a good job. Accepting a zero-shotted service to do something important into your production codebase is still a step too far, but it's an increasingly small step.
I have been doing this to, and I've forgotten half of them. For me the point is that this usage scenario is really good, but it also has no added value to it, really. The moment Claude Code raises it prices 2x this won't be viable anymore, and at the same time to scale this to enterprise software production levels you need to spend on an agent probably as much as hiring two SWEs, given that you need at least one to coordinate the agents.
Codex is as good (or very nearly) as Claude code. Open source models continue to improve. The open source harnesses will also continue to improve. Anthropic is good, but it has no moat. No way could they 100x their prices.
And no, it isn't ONLY because VC capital is being burned to subsidize cost. That is impossible for the dozen smaller providers offering service at that cost on OpenRouter who have to compete with each other for every request and also have to pay compute bills.
Qwen3.5-9B is stronger than GPT-4o and it runs on my laptop. That isn't just benchmarks either. Models are getting smaller, cheaper and better at the same time and this is going to continue.
I've often wondered about building some kind of automated "this codebase already has this logic" linter
Not sure how it would actually work, otherwise I'd build it. But it would definitely be useful
Maybe an AI tool could do something like that nowadays. "Search this codebase for instances of duplicated functions and list them out" sort of thing
At first glance this looks like it might be the halting problem in disguise (instead of the general function of the logic, just ask if they both have logic that halts or doesn't halt). I think we would need to allow for false negatives to even be theoretically possible, so while identical text comparison would be easy enough, anything past that can quickly becomes complicated and you can probably infinitely expand the complexity by handling more and more edge cases (but never every edge case due to the underlying halting problem/undecidability of code).
In Ruby we have the Flay gem, for example.