No. not at all. Imagine that each unit of work (a new PR for a feature, a bugfix) builds something that is 99% close to optimal and you can only get to bring it to 100% if you spend time to really review and rewrite the "not good" part. Also, for the sake of argument, let's just say that the overall quality of the system is geometric mean of the quality score of each unit of work. The only way to get an "ideal" system is by ensuring that work done on it follows the "ideal" architecture - for whatever "ideal" means for the developers/maintainers.

You are arguing that you are saving time because you only have to write the 1% that the AI got wrong, so you'd be getting a 100x speed up. My argument is that there is not so much time because if you want 100% quality, you will have to review 100% of the code. Understanding the produced code is the time-consuming part, not typing it out.

So, the only way to have these time savings by working with coding agents is if you accept that the code generated is good enough to not have careful review. But if you do that, then each unit of work that you tell yourself "not ideal but good enough. Ship it and we refactor later" ends up bringing the overall system quality. If you have 10 of these "99% good enough" PRs, and your overall system score is already at 90%. With 50 of these, the score dives down to 60%.

This is what OP and I are talking about "compounding" issues: unless we get to a point where generated code does not need review at all, your development speed will always be bottle-necked by the human in the loop. The only way to get speed benefits from the code generation is if we remove the human in the loop, but in doing so quality will drop faster than you can fix it.

The only way I see AI coding working in the long run is if we go back to a Waterfall/BDUF process and having actual engineering. Let engineers really own the architecture. Enforce that any new feature - no matter how small - to be specced out with complete sequence diagrams. Ensure that every new software package needs to be put on an UML component diagram for the team to review and see each addition interacts with the whole system, etc.

If we do that, then we can just give all the documents to a coding agent and say "go ahead and implement this" with a minimal amount of confidence. But in doing this, I bet we will realize the following:

    - the "effort" has never been about writing code itself. The code is just the material manifest of all the thought that went to think over a solution into the problems that the product is attempting to solve.

   - we will likely be better off by using code generation tools (i.e, UML-to-code) and a "weak" LLM (than can run locally) than by playing the token lottery at the Anthropic Casino.

IOW, you don't really think the value of this work is really worth $4k.

> why would I pay to do my job?

The question is: how long do you think that you employer will be willing to pay for you and Anthropic, if you yourself said if it were your money you'd put some time and effort to work with an open model?

No, but without it wouldn't come to existence. You can call it "moving the goal posts" if you want, my point is these efforts are not primarily motivated for the good of society and whatever advances we have are accidental, secondary effects.

> Your original statement didn't say it had to be a top-down effort.

I am responding to someone giving the example of the pyramids as something that could only be achieved due to "hierarchy, management and process", do I have to say it?

Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down process.

Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.

LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you bring a cultural landmark that it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.

For what, a glorified tomb?

I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans". It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.

To illustrate the point: Facebook laid off thousands of developers at the same time that it was hiring AI researchers, paying them tens of millions of dollars as a signing bonus.