What happens in a year or two, when we continue shipping code that’s consistently more complex than it needs to be?
In the traditional software lifecycle, this does not look sustainable.
It seems that the reason agentic coding sort of works today is that LLMs make “refactoring by rewriting/regenerating from scratch” affordable, and when people regenerate from scratch, one avoids one traditional source of problems (accumulations of defects on top of defects on top of defects on top of … ), hence the LLM complexity overhead remains bounded rather than increasing in an unbounded fashion and sinking the project.
Of course, in a year or two people expect to benefit from better coding agents, with better taste and less propensity for unnecessary complexity (and so they do expect that eventually this practice of “refactoring by regenerating from scratch” will wash the unnecessary complexity away as agents become better).
In the traditional software lifecycle, this does not look sustainable.
It seems that the reason agentic coding sort of works today is that LLMs make “refactoring by rewriting/regenerating from scratch” affordable, and when people regenerate from scratch, one avoids one traditional source of problems (accumulations of defects on top of defects on top of defects on top of … ), hence the LLM complexity overhead remains bounded rather than increasing in an unbounded fashion and sinking the project.
Of course, in a year or two people expect to benefit from better coding agents, with better taste and less propensity for unnecessary complexity (and so they do expect that eventually this practice of “refactoring by regenerating from scratch” will wash the unnecessary complexity away as agents become better).