The New Calculus of AI-Based Coding

The blog posts the experiences of trying to write out a new service in AWS with mostly agentic coding.

The project was generally a success and achieved replacement of internal bedrock services.

BUT, it came with various caveats:

1. the communication bottleneck is significant and alignment becomes even more expensive between engineers

2. engineering decisions cascade and become even more important, so you need high quality decision makers. The entire team was highly skilled, principal and distinguished engineer level.

3. every single blocker that you had administerially previously would need to be broken down, and your organization has to functionally already be in full continuous deployment mode already. if you aren't, the increased velocity is useless.

4. even with increased velocity, further bottlenecks were induced such as the rate of safe deployments through the pipeline, the ability to A/B/feature flag test, soak tests, and others.