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Comment by pizzly | Hacker News Reader

Agree with programming is meditative but disagree that agent-based development means there is no thinking. Agent-based development means more thinking like a lower level manager. You spend more time making architecture decisions, making decisions on the user interface, trying to manage your time and your agents time to increase the amount of work produced in the same time, asking the agent about the code and making new decisions. For many people who went in programming thats not their strong suite and hence is really exhausting. Instead of living in the code you are managing the code and using a part of the brain you are not good at.

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> Agent-based development means more thinking like a lower level manager. You spend more time making architecture decisions, making decisions on the user interface,

Whose manager is making these decisions? My managers have always been concerned with how much workload everyone has, delegating tasks at an extremely high level that they barely understand, and handling the messy human interface between their reports and senior leadership so that everyone on their team is kept happy and properly compensated.

I have been in this industry for almost twenty years and I have NEVER had an engineering manager making architecture decisions (that's either my job or the lead engineer's job, depending) or UX interface decisions (that's the realm of Product).

If my LLM agents start taking sick leaves and pager duty rotations then I'll start entertaining this bullshit line about being a manager

designers, team leads, tech leads, architects, senior devs are all doing this kind of formal or informal management work

just because someone doesn't have the "manager" in their job title they might still do a lot of supervision

But how many "architecture decisions" do you really have to make when it comes to any proper project? Also "making decisions on the user interface" is literally what frontend engineers have done for years (so you're still working as an engineer while you claim to be a "manager"). If you are in programming and programming is not your strong suite, the moral thing to do is either get better at programming or seek an actual manager job where it makes sense to use the "part of the brain" you are good at. Why do you need to pretend that being a good manager = being a good programmer? Why do you not care about being a good programmer and just the output of waht the agents are doing? You're purely thinking of it from a business pov and optimizing time but you're missing the individual programmer who actually sees value in programming and wants to get better.

You should probably be deferring to the agent on nearly all architecture decisions; it's trained on a lot more architectures than you'll ever see in your life, and it does a better job of designing architectures for common problems than many engineers at this point.

You have to ask it to consider the architecture, or it'll cut the shortest path to any solution, but if you ask it, it'll come up with likely a better approach than you would have invented.

Your job is mostly to ask it to think about all the aspects, and then do manual testing on the output. The agent can take care of the rest.

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