Lol. I’m totally with you on agentic UX development. It’s frequently terrible, and you can tell which companies are telling everyone to 10x with AI. But the problem is testing, not the coding. My first stab at a UX render usually sucks too, it’s the iteration that brings perfection. It’s the same for agentic development.
What I meant though wasn’t agents building UX. I meant that in our case at least, the agent is the UX. “put a new extension 117 for Sam at the port next to Jane’s, and have it ring through to his cell when he’s not in the office. Leave the old 117 as is but only ring where Sam is, if that is known” basically, agents just do everything with SSH, and you can talk to them instead of poking around with a mouse. We don’t build ux for internal systems anymore. Local inference is strong enough to be reliable now with the correct tools and policies, and for 10-20k in hardware you are self contained. (Obviously $more if you are going to have a lot of people using it at the same time)
The “one wierd trick” is to build testing jugs for everything. Before a configuration is deployed, it’s tested against a toy instance, all existing functions are tested in all common cases, new functions verified, inputs fuzzed, adversarily abused, and stress tested against dummy loads. If its code, it gets examined against development policy, self containment, explicit interface walls, race conditions, code standards, complexity, factorability, and often A/B testing of different architectural choices. Except cryptography and a couple of other things, we generally prohibit the use of any libraries, it’s just not needed and the code never passes our tests anyway.
People are just YOLOing it and assuming that if it basically functions and looks right then it must be perfect. You’d have the same luck if you told your UX guy “test only the obvious, and if it looks about right at first glance, merge it. Don’t do extensive testing.”
The real thing with AI is that now you can afford to do a ridiculous amount of automated testing, setting up test fixtures, hardware simulators, mannequins of all the external interfaces, fuzzing, etc. Our testing code is 2-3x our product code, and we are shipping 10% of the bugs we shipped with humans, and it’s still 1/4 the cost and 4-10x the speed.
People shipping all the crap that is everywhere now have bad process engineering. Plain and simple. If you try to build software with AI like you used to with people, you’re going to have a bad time. The pipeline is very different.