Agreed. The bottleneck is QA/Code review and that is never going away from most corps. I've never worked at a job in tech that didn't require code review and no, asking a code agent to review a PR is never going to be "good enough".
And here we are, the central argument for why code agents are not these job killing hype beasts that are so regularly claimed.
Has anyone seen what multi-agent code workflows produce? Take a look at openclaw, the code base is an absolute disaster. 500k LoC for something that can be accomplished in 10k.
My head of engineering spent half a day creating a complex setup of agents in opencode, to refactor a data model across multiple repositories. After a day running agents and switching between providers to work around the token limits, it dumped a -20k +30k change set we'll need to review.
If we're very lucky, we'll break even time wise compared to just running a single agent on a tight leash.
While reading your comment the Benny Hill theme Yackety Sax started playing in my head.
YOLO. Just ship it.
> I've never worked at a job in tech that didn't require code review
I have. Sometimes the resulting code was much worse than what you get from an LLM, and yet the project itself was still a success despite this.
I've also worked in places with code review, where the project's own code quality architecture-and-process caused it to be so late to the market it was an automatic failure.
What matters to a business is ideally identical to the business metrics, which are usually not (but sometimes are) the code metrics.
The bottleneck at larger orgs is mostly always decision-making.
Getting code written and reviewed is the trivial part of the job in most cases, discovering the product needs, considering/uncovering edge-cases, defining business logic that is extensible or easily modifiable when conditions change, etc. are the parts that consume 80% of my time.
We in the engineering org at the company I work for have raised this flag many times during adoption of AI-assisting tools, now that the rollout is deeply in progress with most developers using the tools, changing workflows, it has become the sore thumb sticking out: yes, we can deliver more code if it's needed but for what exactly do you need it?
So far I haven't seen a speed up in decision-making, the same chain of approvals, prioritisation, definitions chugs along as it was and it is clearly the bottleneck.
i dont think thats actually the bottleneck?
the bottleneck is aligning people on what the right thing to do is, and fiting the change into everyone's mental models. it gets worse the more people are involved
> Take a look at openclaw, the code base is an absolute disaster. 500k LoC for something that can be accomplished in 10k.
Mission accomplished: acquhire worth probably millions and millions.
I agree with you, by the way.
It was a hire not an acquihire. There was no acquisition.
There was a big payoff on signing so to-may-to, to-mah-to.
I'm sorry but consider how many more edge cases and alternatives can be handled in 500k LoC as compared to that tiny 10k.
In the days of AGI, higher LoC is better. It just means the code is more robust, more adaptable, better suited to real world conditions.
That’s… not how software works, no matter how it is produced. Complexity is the enemy; always.
I imagine to get more robust code your agent can replace for loop with long lines of if-then statements. Later manager can brag about how many lines of code they created!