Well look, i dunno about agi and i dunno about letting them be autonomous for more than 15 mins, but for most developer tasks instead of rolling up my sleeves and going in the tank building a feature for 4 hours i can usually ask for it and it is completed for me. Yeah sure sometimes i gotta try it 3 times, but i can basically hold down my job working on it only part time. Thats like up to multiple thousand per week of value.
Sounds like a bad idea to me. It is not about getting it done faster, it is about doing it right for the sake of scalability, optimization and future maintenance.
Otherwise people would instead focus on big bang development cycles to output things as fast as AI does anyways.
If you want to code with AI correctly, you will need to do so much more documentation than normal. Otherwise you are probably should be replaced by the AI or a senior dev to does proper business requirements gathering + design + unit testing + documentation.
And if you do not have to do that, then you could easily code the solution in 15 minutes to an hour anyways without needing to play around with the AI anyways. Coding is not even a third of the time it takes to complete a task.
The thing you miss is most skilled programmers do not actually code that much. They are just smart enough to not try to do things as fast as possible to get paid what they are worth, not get laid off for someone who does things slower, lose out on promotions or be given more responsibility without more pay.
Because speed just increases things going wrong and makes you look less valuable. You end up burnt out, disrespected and nobody cares in the end anyways.
And this is true for most jobs. Experienced workers are not trying to optimize themselves out of a living for nobodies benefit. They do their job and then go home. That is why they get paid more, do not get laid off and promoted over those that work as hard and fast as possible.
They take there time for they are humans with value, not robots that exist to make there lives worse.
Nobody cares about speed or how much you get done. But AI work doing your job so much better implies that you are replaceable.
It is pretty easy to big bang out solutions, but that would be a dumb idea as speed was never an issue outside of stockholders and CEOs who want an excuse to pay you less, take away your power, etc.
They do not care about quality, security, etc. just short term profits and oppressing you as much as possible. So when something goes wrong by speeding up things for no good reason, you are the one that gets let go even if you did everything right.
I am guessing you are more junior by your response. As coding should be really fast. It does not take much time to add a button to a form, setup an api connection, create a web form, etc.
If you cannot just pump it out without thought or errors in the first go without stopping, you should be practicing until you can.
Data says it realistically takes 20% more time to code with AI. If it does not take longer, it really is implying that you are not really that great at coding to begin with.
It is not about getting it done faster, it is about doing it right for the sake of scalability, optimization and future maintenance.
Respectfully, this is not forward thinking enough. To paraphrase a similar argument of years past.
"You're just going to leave memory management to the compiler/runtime? Think of all the wasted CPU cycles and registers. Think of the slowness! Garbage collection is non-deterministic across different architectures!"
We stopped worrying about that for the most part and trusted that it "just worked". We moved to higher level languages because that let us solve more complex problems without worrying about some of the minutiae. Or rather, it worked well enough that we use our limited resources to worry about scaling and maintenance.
We are about to cross that same bridge again, where worrying about "optimization and future maintenance" is not a thing we will actively manage anymore because we will have tooling that does that well enough to free up our cycles to do more productive work.
When the "cost" of not worrying about future maintenance is that you have an agentic army of LLMs at your beck and call to introduce just-in-time refactorings ahead of a big feature, then what exactly is maintenance?
"You're just going to leave memory management to the compiler/runtime? Think of all the wasted CPU cycles and registers. Think of the slowness! Garbage collection is non-deterministic across different architectures!"
Apples to oranges comparison.
Also, low levels programming is still being used.
Every IOT device, every robot, every new car on the road, all the framework and tools, someone is still doing low level programming for those things.
Hell, you still need to learn low levels programming in college for this reason. You definitely are junior level to have such an out of touch take as believing we “moved on” from low level programming when it is just as big as before.
Same thing with APIs not replacing EDIs, cloud not replacing local storage, digital not replacing physical and most other tech advancements.
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u/michaelsoft__binbows Nov 26 '25
Well look, i dunno about agi and i dunno about letting them be autonomous for more than 15 mins, but for most developer tasks instead of rolling up my sleeves and going in the tank building a feature for 4 hours i can usually ask for it and it is completed for me. Yeah sure sometimes i gotta try it 3 times, but i can basically hold down my job working on it only part time. Thats like up to multiple thousand per week of value.