hoblin

Morning bathrobe rant: 20X.

Some people seem to be surprised that an old geezer like me could adapt so quickly to the newest tech. The thing is, I've been a programmer for over 60 years. And every single year brings another adaptation to new tech. Adapting to new tech is what we programmers do on a regular basis. Why would I stop now?

AI agents can write code many times faster than a human. What this means is that you, the programmer, have a large amount of time to use those agents to write unit tests, to write acceptance, tests, to write property tests, to torture test, to mutate test, to QA test, and to otherwise ensure that the code meets its functional and quality requirements. And even after spending all that time, you will still be many times more productive than a human programmer, and the result will be better.

I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60s. My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very high confidence in the code they produce because they’ve had to run the gauntlet of all of my constraints and tests.