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Comment by firasd | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there is cargo culting afoot

There are definitely guys in some companies just pointing an agent swarm at 50 Github tickets and saying "go get 'em boys" and hence need a lot of orchestration tools but for the rest of us do we really need the AI to do all the build steps and the testing steps... or do we just need the new feature that runs when the button is clicked and then we can check it out in the browser ourselves. The code gen is what I need the AI for, not the 'smoke tests' and the tsc finagling. I'm willing to spend some mental calories myself in figuring this feature out step by step

Actually this makes me wonder if some people are just not very into building step by step like "okay first let's check the JSON shape the endpoint returns", "okay now let's make a simple form", etc

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> just pointing an agent swarm at 50 Github tickets and saying "go get 'em boys"

I still don‘t know if this is real. If it works like that, where are the companies that only kept every tenth, 10x‘d AI enhanced dev? They should have significantly higher margins. The companies that keep all devs and 10x‘d them, finally bringing that backlog to 0 should have exploding revenue and profit.

Where does AI create value? I can‘t see it.

I use it every day, but nothing got faster.

The creation of downstream issues has gotten faster, in my experience. The rate at which shit is thrown against walls has also gotten faster.

Exactly. If you can free engineering capacity from tedious busywork (fixing bugs), you have them available for implementing/delegating to implement experimental features into new revenue streams.

Why fire anyone in this scenario? Growth is only going to keep coming.

> They should have significantly higher margins.

I don't think devs are that expensive relative to a big company.

Airbnbs revenue last year was 12b. If they have 1000 engineers,maybe average 200k/yr that's only 200m. If they got rid of their engineers still only a fraction of of the revenue

> some people are just not very into building step by step like "okay first let's check the JSON shape the endpoint returns", "okay now let's make a simple form", etc

That's accurate. There are a lot of people (some of them quite senior and/or skilled) who operate in the way you described.

The build and test steps allow the agent to self correct. Why would I want to waste my time trying out a half-finished or outright broken feature if the AI didn't even run a type checker on it to see if it even compiled?

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