Short answer: Iliya Valchanov says his team tracks how much code each person reads, from 90% to 30%, and spun up four more environments to test PRs. Jordan Metzner asks whether learning to write code still matters.
Watch this answer from Episode 35 (starts at 19:44) · Episode 35 notes and transcript
From Episode 35: AI Agents Are Replacing Entire Marketing Teams, starting at 19:44.
Iliya Valchanov [19:43]: We have a coefficient at work. So how much of the code do you read? And each person on the team has the coefficient. And some people read 90% of the code. Others read 30% of the code. It's very, very interesting because this varies all the time, but it's kind of clear that we're all converging to reading less and less of the code. Actually, what we did was we spun up four more environments of our software, and we're just putting the PRs on these environments so we can test them. So it was much more important for us to have more places to see what the agents are doing to the product rather than read more code.
Jordan Metzner [20:22]: Yeah. I don't know. We don't have like a coefficient like that, but it's you know, I think it has to do with like developer trust, like how well they trust the model and how well they think of their output. And you know, I think I still think, Glenn, that the 10x developers are still like maintaining themselves in position of being 10x. Like they're still providing a lot more value than like a standard developer because they just can, to your point, like abstract more agents and get more complicated work done. But yeah, it seems like we're driving towards a path of like nobody is going to read it. It's just a bunch of, gibberish per se. Right? And what's even more I think interesting is like how do people learn computer science in today's day and age? I mean, if you were to go to, university and take a computer science degree, is learning how to write Python and functions and for loops like even critical or important?
Jordan Metzner [21:10]: And you know, is that type of base knowledge important now or in the future? Or you know, is it something that like we don't ever have to think about ever again and it's maybe a wasted talent? I don't know. I mean like programming in general has always been this kind of thing that's like very difficult to do for most people and for many people. Like only certain people are like have been able to do it really well while others struggle with it. Plus you do the abstraction of it and just the learning of any specific language itself like, that's why kind of TypeScript was so performant because it was able to take away so many of the annoying things of JavaScript. But, now the next thing is just script. Right? And that's where we're we're at right now. It's just write in plain English and get back what you want. Yeah. Don't know. It's really fun and interesting and exciting and like I mentioned in the intro, this week has been crazy and so was last week and so was the week before and, I mean, I think these in the frontier models coming out every day with new product features just as a developer, it makes our lives super exciting.
