I feel like I was totally on board until the conclusion about one fast system and one stable one. It's not really possible in practice, once a customer starts paying for something, even a vibe coded app by a sales person, it's now a stable system.

The thing breaks, the salesperson says "can you check this out?" then disappears and we're back to where we started.

I don't even find this very new: many companies I've been at have tried to spin-off a "fast" team to sell stuff.

It sounds like a perfect idea on paper until you notice that junior devs will not be able to learn about stable code. Unless AI get's good enough to write stable code, or good enough that no human has to look in the code, the next generation will face a bigger problem than now. Well it's AI that started it so let's make AI take responsibility... Oh they can't. Now what?

I partly agree. Agents are not going to replace senior devs. Exactly for the internal context and the decision making that comes with it.

But senior devs are also expected to have a compounding effect even pre-AI. Writing a single doc, refactoring legacy code to make it extensible, building security frameworks specific to the project and many more. All of these would compound the dev team.

I think the same will happen with agents working on a org specific paved path set by senior devs.

I think it's possible that this idea would work as a communication/branding strategy for senior developers, though I don't think it's strictly true.

I am really skeptical of arguments based around "I can do things the model can't" because that space of things is not very large and is getting smaller every day.

The opportunity to not merely cling on to what we have another year but to grow is to say "together, the model can manage so much more complexity than before that we can do things that were not previously possible."

We haven't identified too many of those things yet, but I am certain they are coming.

I tripped over the double-entendre of the teaser quote and then found it ironic that the author is a copy writer.

>> “AI agents are the future of software development. We won’t need developers anymore to slow down the progress of a business.”

> And so, to me, a copywriter, what’s happening here is that the same message is meaning two different things to two different audiences.

I couldn't tell whether to parse this as "We will be faster without those slow developers", or more cynically as "We don't need developers to slow us down; We can now be slow with ai agents". I suspect that with creeping complexity the latter reading will hold up better for large projects.

The polarization of speed vs scale concern on team is interesting.

Maps to what we believe on our team - functional vs non-functional. AI ships functional features fast but developers are more important than ever in making sure the non-functional aspects are taken care of

Interesting article. I appreciate the range of perspectives here, and the overall pitch to keep the most experienced in frame along side new-fangled advancements (AI).

The "speed" loop reminds me a lot of RAD. In fact, AI might be _the_ thing that helps us deliver on RAD's promises from decades ago.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/software-engineering/software-...

I stopped communicating my experience-derived lessons when I discovered that 1. it cheapened the perception of "my genius", and 2. nobody wants to hear it anyway. From non-tech workers for whom I'd write a bat or bash script for, to engineers for whom I'd debug a complex race condition - they all just want the answer and care nothing about how I got it.

Fine, then, I'll keep the experience to myself.