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The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

(blog.nilenso.com)
170 points mogambo1 | 2 comments | 18 Sep 25 13:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.487s | source
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liszper ◴[18 Sep 25 13:55 UTC] No.45289744[source]▶
most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today

thanks for the article, it's a good one

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angusturner ◴[18 Sep 25 14:29 UTC] No.45290163[source]▶
I think most SWEs do have a good idea where I work.

They know that its a significant, but not revolutionary improvement.

If you supervise and manage your agents closely on well scoped (small) tasks they are pretty handy.

If you need a prototype and don't care about code quality or maintenance, they are great.

Anyone claiming 2x, 5x, 10x etc is absolutely kidding themselves for any non-trivial software.

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1. jmcodes ◴[18 Sep 25 20:58 UTC] No.45294931[source]▶
I've found a pretty good speed up just letting Claude Code run with a custom prompt to gather the context (relevant files, types, etc..) for the task then having it put together a document with that context.

It takes all of five minutes to have it run and at the end I can review it, if it's small ask it to execute, and if it actually requires me to work it myself well now I have a reference with line numbers, some comments on how the system appears to work, what the intent is, areas of interest, etc..

I also rely heavily on the sequential thinking MCP server to give it more structure.

Edit:

I will say because I think it's important I've been a senior dev for a while now, a lot of my job _is_ reviewing other people's pull requests. I don't find it hard or tedious at all.

Honestly it's a lot easier to review a few small "PRs" as the agent works than some of the giant PRs I'd get from team members before.

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2. zmmmmm ◴[18 Sep 25 21:43 UTC] No.45295387[source]▶
> I've been a senior dev for a while now, a lot of my job _is_ reviewing other people's pull requests

I kind of hate that I'm saying this, but I'm sort of similar and one thing I really like is having zero guilt about trashing the LLM's code. So often people are submitting something and the code is OK but just pervasively not quite how I like it. Some staff will engage in micro arguments about things rather than just doing them how I want and it's just tiring. Then LLMs are really good at explaining why they did stuff (or simulating that) as well. LLMs will enthusiastically redo something and then help adjust their own AGENTS.md file to align better in the future.