Yet, with a few people in my network, it's like they're living 10 years ahead. Guys are automating everything in their jobs, spinning up 10 specialized agents at a time and running multi-agent pipelines, just doing all sorts of crazy things with this tech that I just can't even fathom. It seems like it's making them way more productive.
I have found a way to fit code-writing and question-answering chatbots into my workflow. I have NOT done the same in terms of these crazy Agent setups. There's clearly a way to leverage these tools to turbocharge your productivity, like at least 2x or maybe even 10x. But what is it?
Are there any Agentic power users out there who can enlighten me? What are the best ways to take advantage of these new tools?
Event if the agents are writing code (lets say) 10 times faster, some human has to review it right? So there is still a bottleneck. And I would say that person should be the first to review it before sending it for review to other team members.
Even if there are tests, I never feel comfortable committing code that I haven't understood at least on a broad level.
I do use all those tools, since from the very beginning when ChatGPT even wasn't widely available.
If you are automating something that isn't high impact or important, sure just let it write the code and don't even verify it.
But in a big org, you'll need to validate it on every step, every generated line of code can have bugs, injections and negative side-effects.
I believe you'll be more productive by using it, and prompting well, but you'll need to invest much more time on double-checking if everything is working accordingly to what you initially planned, or you might ship very broken code in production that can be difficult to revert, at a times.
2x productivity is possible, but it really depends on the kind of tasks you get. If your entire job is prototyping stuff, sure you are now 100x+.
But if you need to write very complex business logic that will last for years, with lots of back and forth and discussions with PMs and whatnot, which is the majority of SWE corporate jobs... my bet you'd be at maximum 1.5x!
also vs code + github copilot pro plus for more context