Anecdotal experience amongst my small team:
- spending exorbitant amounts of time up front planning, surfacing every milestone, subtask, and individual change, burning tons of tokens in addition to man hours fixing minute but important mistakes or derivations despite explicit instructions, CLAUDE.md, memory subsystems, agent and skill instructions, etc.
- executing and reviewing results compared to the plan and finding even more mistakes and derivations from the plan often takes a lot of time
- the relative rapidity produces a lot of output for the team which stresses our lifecycle and introduces feelings the whole process is on the verge of flying off the rails
- individual developers have different expectations, definitions of acceptable, skills/experience to detect and deal with problems, and patience. I might spend hours to days meticulously planning and executing a ticket and another guy might yolo it in 30 minutes. Other than bug escape rate and tracking review failures I’m struggling with how to track people who are “doing it wrong” let alone telling them the “right” way to do it.
- growing exhaustion, lack of ownership and confidence, frustration, and a generalized feeling of endlessly fighting your tools but in a weird way they never seem to really improve despite all your efforts to do so
- taking humans out of the loop and letting the agents be more autonomous in hopes that we’ll reduce the bottleneck and produce better results has not helped.
- I find even myself fighting (and sometimes failing) the urge to give in even though the proposed or implemented solution doesn’t feel right. Scale that across your team
- experience has not really changed despite changes in models and harnesses
- there’s a deep feeling that I’m doing something wrong and fomo since so many people in the industry boast of incredible results. I probably am, but everything I’ve read about and tried has not really moved the needle much and it’s introducing another dimension of exhaustion and frustration
overall, I don’t feel like we’re being much more productive when you factor in quality and accountability (which should be a given, but this industry increasingly overtaken by a reckless philosophy of speed over everything else). I do think it has helped parallelize tasks, produce higher quality PoCs to explore more options and do it faster, offload joyless but necessary tasks that are narrow in scope and measurable, do exploratory work and act as a generalized interactive knowledge base, and make shallow techniques, technologies, etc. that you don’t yet have experience with. Maybe I’m just missing a critical component or two in the process (formal specification, etc). Maybe it’s growing pains, or maybe there’s a looming rot. Either way job satisfaction and confidence in my work is much lower than I would have expected.