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

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

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.

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.