Finding It Challenging to Maintain Software Created with Coding Agents?

9 points by nlpnerd 4 days ago | 7 comments

We do have in place proper PRDs and system designs and implementation plans that we feed to the agent.

I'm an MLE and SWE, so it's not like I can't read code or don't know any proper practices. What is different though are that

Since we are not spending 6-8 hours a day working with the code base unlike pre-coding agents, we lack the indepth knowledge and intuition that helps us narrow down root cause when bugs arise, or know how to best extend the current code base to support a new feature

Because of the productivity from coding agents, the size of the code base and sophistication of the app relative to number of developers has also increased. Each developer now needs to maintain context and understanding over a greater surface area and number of micro services. Over time this makes reviewing extension to the app and code base increasingly more difficult cognitively.

Anyone else dealing with this too? Is it just a problem with our engineering processes? What works for you?

james_ross 3 days ago |

I'm about to try Matt Pocock's skills for more rigorous agentic engineering now that my code base is climbing towards 100kloc, but can't yet testify to their effectiveness. People I trust swear by them: https://github.com/mattpocock/skills

evolve2k 4 days ago |

My first statement would be that surely the challenge you are experiencing is pretty similar to what Ford has reported around its recent AI adoption.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446

nlpnerd 4 days ago | |

Well...we didn't sack anybody if you were wondering. I feel like Ford's issues is mainly overestimating AI's capabilities. Whereas our case is more of a need for re-engineering processes to be more AI-native.

rurban 4 days ago |

If you cannot maintain it, the agent has to maintain it.

If the agent cannot maintain it, you are lost.

nlpnerd 4 days ago | |

That's kind of stretching things. It's not that software cannot be maintained but the cognitive load of building and maintaining software seems to be now backloaded to the maintaining part and people need to be aware of this.

beardyw 4 days ago |

It will get much worse before anyone wakes up to this problem.

nlpnerd 3 days ago | |

Yeah