A New Problem Space
I mentioned in an earlier post that, as a developer working in their spare time to make production-grade software, agentic engineering increases my effectiveness around 50x over hand-coding.
Mature engineering organizations aren't seeing those types of gains for a multitude of reasons which are mostly easy to suss out. I think the current rule of thumb is that mature organizations are seeing gains on the order of 25% as a first step if they can effectively introduce agentic development. Which seems like it might not be worth it, when you're also, to some extent, giving up control of the your code to a robot.
Meanwhile, all sorts of new concerns arise.
LLMs are, in many instances, unreliable. Give them too much context, too much information, too many tools, and they bog down with cognitive overload. Give them too little, and they hallucinate the information they need. The technical requirements of a system that addresses this conundrum effectively can be extremely complex.
They're also expensive, which the Claude subscription model tends to hide (these subscriptions are super subsidized). With a good tracking system like what we use in our dashboards, you can see what the API-equivalent costs are for subscription calls and it can be eye-opening -- a $200/month subscription can easily absorb $10,000 worth of API calls in that month.
I like building things, and I've always taken pride in architecting elegant code. There's something extremely satisfying about getting an object just right, where it maps perfectly to the problem domain, where it's clearly reusable and maintainable and will serve the system quietly and beautifully. With agentic engineering, honestly, that all goes away.
Instead, the problem space shifts, from engineering software to engineering a software factory. How do we build this system -- even a system for a single developer on a single computer -- that runs more efficently, producing higer quality outputs at a lower cost? The good news is that it is real engineering, with a lot of levers that we can bring our expetise to, even though its a totally new problem space from where we recently spent our focus.