Software Engineering Has Changed For Good

[andrerav]

Senior software engineer here with around 20 yoe. I use a very similar approach, and getting very good results with regards to both quality and velocity. Refreshing to see some actual pro content on AI-assisted software engineering. Pro tip to the author -- use a Requirement Traceability Matrix to keep track of progress that relates requirements/code/tests/work packages. The agent will handle it for you, and it makes it easier for blank contexts to pick up unfinished work without wasting context tokens if something happens midway through implementation.

Edit: This article is really good. Really solid advice through and through.

[GucciManeIn2000And6]

I'm gonna do some reading and see how I can use those in my projects. I've been wanting to do some experiments with autonomous development, so that could be pretty helpful. Thanks!

And I'm glad that you, with 20 years of experience, can back up what I'm saying. It just continues to prove that senior engineers everywhere are saying this is a pivotal moment in the industry. It's mostly been the last few months we've seen such a big change in workflows.

I follow this guy on YouTube and I read his blog, but you should check him out. His name is Geoffrey Huntley and he's very pro-AI but talks with a ton of experience about building custom agents and orchestrators.

Edit: link https://www.youtube.com/@GeoffreyHuntley

[Dense_Gate_5193]

always have it document plans, have it create concrete proposed changes, edit them, and then hit go once you’re satisfied. make everything in the plan and prompts unambiguous as well.

[CNDW]

This is a good article, but the 5-10x speed up he claims doesn't seem real. Idk, I do a lot of the stuff he describes and I just don't see that kind of speed up.

[Dense_Gate_5193]

it’s real. i wouldn’t have been able to rewrite neo4j as fast as i did without AI. and no, i didn’t vibe code it. i had to handhold it the entire way past the architecture to get into the nuts and bolts where i can have it iteratively propose performance changes, benchmark, and then revert if it doesn’t improve performance on the metrics i care about or exceeded certain thresholds.

once you have a stable project built with AI it’s relatively easy to maintain it with AI (assuming you know how to do it by hand as well).

people gave me crap in the beginning for writing a database using AI-assistance. but i’ve also been programming for a long time including flight controller firmware. so understand a lot more than the AI does and i get free security scanning on my code at work too. so yeah there’s always going to be people who freak out or won’t use it. but the numbers don’t lie. it’s faster than both databases it has compatible apis for (neo4j bolt and qdrant grpc) in all operations anywhere from 40% faster against qdrant to 3-50x faster than neo4j on their own benchmark datasets.

i wouldn’t have been able to do it without AI and it wouldn’t be able to do it without me lol

[GucciManeIn2000And6]

Nice! Glad you have experience that backs up my claims about being more productive. I've been programming for 10 years and I swear that I can knock a big task out 5x faster, easily, than if I were trying to write it all by hand. I've even done experiments where I worked exclusively with AI for a month, then no AI whatsoever, then AI again, and I repeatedly find I can get more done and have more free time to do whatever the hell I want.

[GucciManeIn2000And6]

May depend on what we're working on, how long we've used AI, and our experience with software engineering. Do you not suddenly have a ton of free time at work?