Is work faster, or do we have more work to manage?
The first week after I drove home from our holiday road-trip, I opened my laptop and thought, let’s give this vendor one more try. Let test it and try once more if I can improve my ‘wip’ game I was working on for a long time but couldn’t get to the level I wanted.
It was quite shocking that it took 30 min and the agent working on it did it better than I expected/asked and the result was in essence fully working. I recognized that agents have so much potential, and it just took away all my joy of coding small apps for fun. I shut down my computer and thought- goodbye hobby.
A week later I started accepting the idea, that my new role is product owner, with an intern that does everything I want. In the following days/evenings, I started working on some more ideas in parallel. I whipped up several apps, added level screens, music, even made templates and ci/cd and was feeling like a true leader.
Now; a few weeks later- I’ve burned a bunch of tokens, have several subscriptions resulting in many potential apps to ship. From experience however, I know that the difficulty is after releasing apps, upgrades, new phone types, overall maintenance becomes trickier over time.
This made me wonder how to assess when to release and by what standards and it gets quite thought provoking;
- Is our ci/cd process ready to incorporate ai generated code (code complexity/architecture/guardrails defined- in place)?
- Assuming agents will maintain the application, why not just wait with the release until this is possible?- Should we let the agent dumb down code, so that it is easy to read for a human? (some of the code rendings a game, and the calculations are quite impressive, but if it would contain a bug - I cannot fix it easily)