Post #2189069

2026-04-02 21:48 UTC

Specifically what I find fascinating is: the tooling that would be required to make agentic engineering begin to live up to the hype — much better testing tools, formal business logic specification languages, more powerful and easier to use formal verification tools, better static analysis tooling, etc — would be massively useful to software engineering quite regardless of the existence/utility/quality of LLMs. (4/5)

Replies (6)

@jacob@social.jacobian.org 2026-04-02 21:48

Will we actually build them? I sort of doubt it: the history of software development, and of course the current trajectory, suggests we’ll continue to yolo our way through it. I wouldn’t exactly say I’m optimistic, but hope springs eternal. (5/5)

Open ##2189070
@ehmatthes@fosstodon.org 2026-04-02 21:56

@jacob@social.jacobian.org I keep wanting a deterministic layer in there somewhere. Letting an AI take over the test suite is the piece that feels riskiest to me. That's always been the layer of trust and confidence. A steadily evolving test suite that I understand is my best guarantee that things will continue to work at least as well as they have in the past. If I give over control of that layer, I don't know where my confidence that things will work comes from.

Open ##2189105
@ianbicking@hachyderm.io 2026-04-02 22:10

@jacob@social.jacobian.org I have been doing some of this, mostly cranking up the tools that already exist. I’m pretty sure it helps. But I can also see the agent jumping through all the hoops I give it, and they are both familiar and would be incredibly frustrating for me when hand programming.

Open ##2189106
@b_cavello@mastodon.publicinterest.town 2026-04-03 01:13

@jacob@social.jacobian.org @freakboy3742@cloudisland.nz Yes!! This is a big part of what makes me actually optimistic about the excitement around LLMs and the like: these systems afford us an opportunity to reflect on what we actually are trying to and then create structures conducive to that.

Open ##2189107
@ashfurrow@tenforward.social 2026-04-03 12:10

@jacob@social.jacobian.org yeah, exactly. Lots of AI coding boosters are talking about the importance of tests, documentation, small modules… On one hand, yes! Great ideas! OTOH why did we have to wait for LLMs to prioritize this? (And as soon as we can avoid it, will we?) But, I do like the move to smaller PRs, smaller files, more tests. My biggest challenge is that PR review has become a bigger bottleneck.

Open ##2189108
@cratermoon@zirk.us 2026-04-03 15:30

@jacob@social.jacobian.org Instead of spending $TRILLIONS on ensloppenators, what if we spent a fraction of that money improving the deterministic tools we have?

Open ##2189109