Agree. For me, that's exactly what happened. I work with the agents the way I'd work with a team of developers, not the way I use a compiler. Since the end of September, they've made about 970 commits to a project of mine, and I haven't read a line of its code.
And like with a team, many programs could meet what I asked for, but I check the behavior of what they built, not the code directly. I think of it as working on the level of an engineering director, who also doesn't review code directly. Each agent shows me its change running in the app, in a short narrated screen recording, like in a launch review for the director. When it's not what I meant, I say what, and it goes another round.
I agree. I work in a similar way, and it is quite like managing developers. One difference though: I have no compunction against asking them to write incredibly tedious and long end-to-end tests exercising the user journeys with playwright and an actual db and backend. That helps a lot in making it more likely that regressions will not happen.
loading story #50219737
If you like being a software tester or director, go ahead with it.
However you can't prevent some other people from working as software developers who write and read code.
Even with cars, you still walk. Even with factories, someone still craft handmade bags.
loading story #50205807
How do you check, from examining behavior alone, that the code does not contain stuff like this:
if (date == <some random future date>) { crash_and_burn_the_world() }
??
loading story #50219719
If you are checking every line written by an LLM , what would you estimate is the probability it would ever do this?? I look at most code still and I have a high level of trust that it would never do anything remotely similar to this.
loading story #50206737
loading story #50206482