I don't personally know of any software engineers using AI as "fleets of agents" in a "factory." Sounds like a nightmare.
I usually have a high-level agent drafting plans, then spawning sub-agents to build parts of the plan, other sub-agents to check the work of those agents. Then the PRs have different code review agents looking at the code, on top of the agents for people on my team also reviewing my code.
And I'm probably on the more amateurish end of AI development. As I learned these techniques from YouTube.
When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of agents to solve problems.
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They are doing that because they are running into hardware limits with single agents. If one agent made correct decisions and explored spaces efficiently, they would not need hundreds of thousands of agents. It's is the luxury of great wealth that they can produce a large number of possibly defective samples and then select the ones that are not defective.
Yeah, I very much dispute the characterization GP made as to how software devs are working. I know some are. But I do not believe it's the majority of people in the field, not by a long shot.
you... don't read hackernews much I take it? This is like 10% of all submissions lately, lol.
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Supposedly they are out there. I heard from one person who claimed it. They didn't have a viable product and said their ai spend was in the tens of thousands a month for over 6 months. 1 employee startup baby
Every PR now has auto reviews. That's like at least 3-5+ agents depending on the repo.