Comment by bvirb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bvirb | Hacker News Reader

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When we (the engineering team I work on) started using agents more seriously we were worried about this: that we'd speed up coding time but slow down review time and just end up increasing cycle time.

So far there's no obvious change one way or the other, but it hasn't been very long and everyone is in various states of figuring out their new workflows, so I don't think we have enough data for things to average out yet.

We're finding cases where fast coding really does seem to be super helpful though:

* Experimenting with ideas/refactors to see how they'll play out (often the agent can just tell you how it's going to play out)

* Complex tedious replacements (the kind of stuff you can't find/replace because it's contextual)

* Times where the path forward is simple but also a lot of work (tedious stuff)

* Dealing with edge cases after building the happy path

* EDIT: One more huge one I would add: anywhere where the thing you're adding is a complete analogy of another branch/PR the agent seems to do great at (which is like a "simple but tedious" case)

The single biggest potential productivity gain though I think is being able to do something else while the agent is coding, like you can go review a PR and then when you come back check out what the agent produced.

I would say we've gone from being extremely skeptical to cautiously excited. I think it's far fetched that we'll see any order of magnitude differences, we're hoping for 2x (which would be huge!).

> The single biggest potential productivity gain though I think is being able to do something else while the agent is coding, like you can go review a PR and then when you come back check out what the agent produced.

I've already passed through this phase and have given up on it. I'm sure everyone's experience will vary, but I just find it introduces either sufficiently more context switching or detracts sufficiently enough mental engagement that I end up introducing more errors, feeling miserable, or just straight up losing productivity and focus. This type of workflow is only viable for me if the cost of mistakes is low, the surface area for changes is small, or the mental context is the same between activities.

The expectation that this is a serviceable workflow—I fear, and am experiencing—will ultimately just create more compressed timelines for everything, while quality, design, and job satisfaction will drop. Yes the code can be written while I look at a PR, but if it's a non-trivial amount of code or a non-trivial PR (which tends to become more frequent as more code generation and larger refactors are happening) then I'm just context switching between tasks I need to constantly re-zone in on, which is less gratifying and more volatile in a way that just hurts my mind and soul and money doesn't change in a meaningful way.

That's not to say I'm not using them or seeing no productivity gains, but I'm not reclaiming that much time due to being able to anything concurrently, it's mostly reclaiming time I'd otherwise have procrastinated on something.

For years I worked at a large company with so many blockers for everything that I always worked like this all the time - have 5 projects so when one becomes blocked for external deps, you have one to pull out and work on. There is a context switch (which lead me to context preservation habits like checking everything I write into git; using tmux so that the context is sitting around in the bash history of the shell where I was working, that sort of thing; lots of org files and Mac stickies with TODOs etc).

I still do this, and don't really think it's avoidable, but when the expectation around compressed timelines because of the imaginary ability to rapidly do synchronous non-trivial tasks in parallel, that's both things get sone poorly.

Feels akin to something like driving in stop and go traffic while playing chess with a passenger who's shit talking me.

I've tried the "4 agents running at the same time in different projects/features" and I felt literally dizzy. I still do the "check something else while the agent runs", and I often forget about that terminal window for many minutes, only to remember about it several tasks later.

Developer discovers context switching tax

context switching is amateur stuff. he needs additional 4 terminals to watch over the 4 that are doing the work and just alert him when they misbehave

I find I context switch the same amount, but the cost of context switching was way higher before

> The single biggest potential productivity gain though I think is being able to do something else while the agent is coding, like you can go review a PR and then when you come back check out what the agent produced

Ugh, sounds awful. Constantly context switching and juggling multiple tasks is a sure-fire way to burn me out.

The human element in all of this never seems to be discussed. Maybe this will weed out those that are unworthy of the new process but I simply don't want to be "on" all the time. I don't want to be optimized like this.

Often when you are solving a problem, you are never solving a single problem at a time. Even in a single task, there are 4-5 tasks hidden. you could easily put agent to do one task while you do another.

Ask it to implement a simple http put get with some authentication and interface and logs for example, while you work out the protocol.

Seems like you're your saying there is a such a thing as regenerative, light-weight multi-tasking?

no.

Sure, but the subtasks don't feel completely disparate, probably because there's shared context in working memory.

Insightful and helpful to peer into another company's experience. Mostly agree with your highlighted points.

> The single biggest potential productivity gain though I think is being able to do something else while the agent is coding, like you can go review a PR and then when you come back check out what the agent produced.

This is where unnerving exhaustion comes from though.

I know myself to be on the side of craftsmen. It does takes tons and tons of time to code, but I didn't get exhausted the way I do with AI. AI is productive, I am pro-AI. But boy is it a different kind of work beast.

> Experimenting with ideas/refactors to see how they'll play out (often the agent can just tell you how it's going to play out)

This has helped me a lot. Normally I'd feel really attached to big refactors because of sunk costs, but when AI does a huge refactor it's easier to honestly decide that it wasn't worth it and unnecessarily increased complexity.

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