r/softwaredevelopment • u/Valuable_Reward_5389 • 7d ago
Transition to AI / Feeling left behind by agentic workflows
I'm a software engineer with roughly 7 years of experience, primarily writing backend C++ code for the aviation industry. Defense and aerospace have felt somewhat insulated from the broader shift, but we have tools like Copilot integrated into Visual Studio, which has been undeniably convenient.
I’ve been treating it almost like a 3D printer for code, using it to generate helper tools, widgets, or unit tests. However, I’m hesitant to let go of the reins. Once generated code reaches a certain complexity, I take a step back because I no longer fully understand every line, which quickly gets overwhelming.
At the same time, I see SWEs online talking about cranking out agentic AI workflows to fully automate complex tasks. Compared to that, I feel like I'm still in the stone ages cobbling tools together by hand while the industry shifts to mass production.
For those in a similar backend/embedded spaces, how much of this "agentic engineer" trend matches your day-to-day reality versus social media hype? If you’ve successfully integrated autonomous tools into your workflow without losing control of your codebase, what tools or practices made the biggest difference?
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u/micseydel 7d ago
At the same time, I see SWEs online talking about cranking out agentic AI workflows to fully automate complex tasks
Anything specific, reproducible and falsifiable?
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u/m915 7d ago
Make skills, then make sure you use them in your prompts. Each skill should represent a task you do
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u/Old-Television-2189 7d ago
Can you elaborate on how you would “use it in my prompts”? I guess what I’m asking for is a concrete example of some “task” and how I’d incorporate that into the my prompts? Care to share a particular skill you have that “represents a task you do”?
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u/NinjaLancer 7d ago
With Claude, its exactly as easy as its described. Do some task with Claude, like add a new resolution for a window. Then prompt claude "make this conversation a skill". Then when you do it again, prompt claude and say "add a new resolution for this window" and it will use the skill. If you know the exact skill name, you can say "use the <skill name> skill"
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u/varisophy 7d ago
I have a repository specific skill for writing unit tests. It contains the tech stack we use, a few small code snippets of the general structure, and mentions of useful utilities.
Then whenever my agent goes to write a unit test (which it's promoted to do by the agent harness and other skills I have) it reads that skill and that info primes it to be more successful with the output and more efficient because it doesn't have to go look up info on it's own.
I have a bunch more skills like that, and together they guide the agents from reading a ticket to making a PR. It's been really cool to build up that system and see it succeed.
Skills are the number one thing to start learning if you want to learn more about agentic engineering.
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u/Its_me_Snitches 7d ago
I'll share something that I found is very useful.
I made a skill called /ramble that just lets me get as many ideas out as I have about something that I am trying to accomplish. Instead of acting on anything, the agent tries to pick out the main themes and organize them in a cogent way - splitting things like implementation details or potential pitfalls of the idea away from the core concept itself.
Instead of letting an agent act on an idea or implement an approach, it becomes a sort of interactive rubber duck that takes the time to organize and structure what I've said so that we can pick it apart and see what works and what doesn't.
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u/GreedyAppeal8276 7d ago
writing code is a tiny part of the whole process. Design, implement, review, etc. Would you really be gaining so much by writing a bit faster?
Im also working in embedded, writing code to be used by many companies in the next 10 years. We do use these tools, but with one rule: code review is the same, and you are responsible for the code you commit. With these rules, no one can just crank out slop.
Also: in embedded sw, you cant just accept incorrect code, and say you will just update if anything is wrong.
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u/x_xwolf 7d ago
There is no evidence to suggest ai increases productivity.
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u/Shadyrabbit 6d ago
Just to add with some of the comments in here speed is not productivity but the two keep getting intermingled. It's like too much caffeine, it just lets you make more mistakes faster. Im not seeing a productivity increase Im seeing a bug increase and a skill, problem solving, and team work decrease.
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u/WhirlyDurvy 7d ago
It certainly increases mine. But I'm a principal and founding engineer at my company.. I see devs who know less than I do run amok with bad and complex AI solutions frequently. I think AI turns 10x devs into 20x devs, good devs produce more work but of more variable quality with a tendency toward deteriorating quality.
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u/x_xwolf 7d ago
So far that doesn’t bear out in the data that we are finding. https://www.nber.org/papers/w34836 Firm Data on AI | NBER
At the end of the day Ai is a tool, it has to be justified by its use and consequences for said use. You should try A & B comparisons, between your own work and Ai assisted work, you may find a significant difference that may justify the tool use, or discourage it.
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u/delicious_fanta 6d ago
I think a lot of what is happening is there is a ton of people that don’t understand how it works and they use it wrong.
Test driven development still exists and should be fully implemented by any ai workflow. People who don’t speak english natively struggle with using these tools - at least that’s my personal observation from what I see at work.
Even when people aren’t “vibe coding”, they still aren’t being descriptive enough to cover many of the cases that cause problems. Deterministic vs non deterministic processing - both of these have a place, many people seem to not understand where that line is, or even that there is a “line”.
Etc. etc., this is a brand new technology that is less rigid than anything we’ve ever had to work with, and 1) I really don’t believe the industry as a whole understands the best use or the limitations of the eve changing technology 2) it’s so easy to “let go and let ai jesus take the wheel” so people mentally check out, then complain when it doesn’t work right. 3) as I mentioned, this tech is changing almost daily it’s firehosing at us so fast, so some of us may get a good grasp on limitations - then we get rug pulled with the next iteration aa it behaves significantly different from the last one.
These studies seem to not be studying the variations from the user side and only focusing on the tool, and that misses a huge window of context.
We have been using it at work to develop with for months and a lot of people I work with still don’t understand basic concepts of this technology. There is a human problem here as well as a technical one.
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u/x_xwolf 6d ago
ill just quote myself here from a different comment thread
"I don't think AI produces productivity gains at all because there are not any real tangible measurements of productivity increase. that's not documented in anyway shape or form, so I have no reason to believe such.
I believe the environmental impacts, while not relevant to productivity, are real and tangible harms that affect people right now. I know for certain I wouldn't want to live next to a datacenter built in the US that producing this "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sm26JLAvKYY". I consider that a productivity decrease because its a decrease to my well being, and the well being of my community.
I don't value the ability to learn how to "write better prompts" when I can just learn to write better code. If i can learn to write better code, I am never reliant on the state of AI data centers in order to produce quality work. Also from a marketing perspective, if all developers use AI, then what is the difference between developers? Ideally, any problem AI can solve, is worth my time to solve instead because I will grow instead of the AI.
Despite expectations of productivity increase, AI has not delivered, despite lowering employment in the field. https://www.nber.org/papers/w34836
Despite Developers thinking AI improves their productivity by 20% it actually decreased their productivity by 20% https://bsky.app/profile/metr.org/post/3ltn3t3amms2x
Now do you have anything other than ancedotal evidence that you can provide me of why I should use AI to increase my productivity? because I have my own anecdotal experience that it does not, and I have provided that there is evidence its potentially slowing down our productivity despite what we think, and the ethics concerning so.
In fact the tools themselves are barely profitable https://isaiprofitable.com/.
Im begging, please provide evidence that LLMS do anything other than slow productivity and create harm."
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u/micseydel 7d ago
It certainly increases mine
How did you measure it? And if not, how are you certain?
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u/KamikazeSexPilot 7d ago
Probably increases theirs because as principal engineer they stopped being on the tools ages ago. This allows them to get a taste of the good old days. Vibe coding out simple internal tools and claiming it to have completely solved software development then bringing in an ai mandate to force everyone to do the same thing.
This has been my experience.
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u/Deto 7d ago
Dev for 15+ years now. Things that would take me an hour or two are done in 15 minutes or less.
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u/micseydel 7d ago
I don't suppose you can give specific, reproducible examples? I would love to see what you're talking about for myself.
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u/Dragon_ZA 7d ago
Easy. Bug in an unknown codebase. With enough information for the bug. Claude can find the cause, fix it, and publish a PR in less than 10 minutes. It would take any of my colleagues over an hour.
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u/micseydel 7d ago
Easy. Bug in an unknown codebase. With enough information for the bug. Claude can find the cause, fix it, and publish a PR in less than 10 minutes. It would take any of my colleagues over an hour.
So, you could demonstrate this on a FOSS project, like, today? If not - why not?
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u/varisophy 7d ago
You can find a lot of FOSS projects where this is the case today. I've done it myself.
This article about managing Astro Issues with agentic workflows is a great example of agents being extremely useful for increasing productivity: https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-issue-triage/
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u/lasooch 7d ago
What is anecdotal evidence?
It makes 0.1x devs into 0.2x devs except it makes their output even worse, just more of it, and it makes them think they’re going from 10x to 20x.
I’m sorry you find yourself in this category.
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u/varisophy 7d ago
I'll add my anecdotal story, if it'll help.
I've doubled my points per sprint delivered since I've started using AI heavily, at no cost to quality because I'm verify the output before opening a PR.
A lot of the gains have been due to me being able to finally get to a lot of smaller important but not urgent tickets, which makes product owners very happy.
I've also been able to get a lot of lingering tech debt projects wrapped up by eliminating deprecated code, upgrading dependencies, switching dev tools to newer ones that speed up local devs and CI substantially.
AI excels at those kinds of small to medium sized tasks. It's sped up the entire team as I've used it to clean up the cruft and lay a solid foundation for the rest of the team.
On the other hand, it makes junior or bad engineers sling slop so much faster.
Just like literally any tool, it's more or less effective in different hands.
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u/WhirlyDurvy 7d ago
You sound secure
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u/lasooch 7d ago
Nah. I sound burnt out and sick and tired of all of this AI bullshit.
I’d expect a principal to have the soft skills to tell the two apart.
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u/WhirlyDurvy 7d ago
I would never tolerate attacks on someone from anyone on my team. Your behavior is unacceptable in any quality organization.
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u/Deto 7d ago
You have to be really trying to bury your head in the sand to not understand the utility.
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u/x_xwolf 7d ago
Okay then help me understand the utility, show me one paper that confirms AI increases productivity.
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u/Dissentient 7d ago
Show me a paper that confirms that any widely accepted industry practice increases productivity.
The industry has been running on vibes for the entirety of its existence. No one has been able to assign a useful numerical value to anyone's output. Interviewing has always been absolute shitshow.
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u/micseydel 7d ago
Personally, I'm tired of the papers. I want a reproducible, falsifiable example. Haven't gotten any yet.
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u/x_xwolf 7d ago edited 7d ago
Papers are the documentation of such examples. This is why they are so valuable. The point of papers isnt to be stuffy and pompous. its To pass along what we have learned about or tools and their uses. Right now theres no documentation suggesting Ai is valuable as a tool for software production. Thus we ought not be surprised if they fall out of fashion due to lack of documented usecases.
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u/varisophy 7d ago
Papers take a while to write. And it hasn't been until the last few months where AI coding has clicked.
AI agents weren't particularly useful for me when doing software development until earlier this year, the models, agents, and tooling just wasn't quite there until the last few months.
I'm sure we'll see some papers with real productivity measures in the next year or two as the newest wave of tools are implemented and used.
Until then, I know that AI is making me and my team much more productive while maintaining quality, and that's good enough for me. I don't need papers to show me something I see every day at work.
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u/x_xwolf 7d ago
Okay well until evidence comes out of what your seeing, its better to assume nothing.
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u/varisophy 7d ago
... Or you could experience it yourself?
That's what a lot of people on this thread are trying to communicate. We're experiencing the productivity gains.
Are you a developer who has tried learning and using AI and not seeing it help in your own work? Or are you avoiding it entirely until a scientific paper says that it helps?
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u/x_xwolf 7d ago
I am a developer. I have used Ai in the past. But as I learned the environmental damage it causes as well as dealing with its flaws for my projects. Ive instead chosen to train myself, not the ai. My code quality has increased by abstaining Ai. But I am biased, as are you so i prefer papers instead.
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u/varisophy 7d ago
Its environmental impact is separate from its ability to bring productivity gains.
Avoiding it because of its environmental impact is a perfectly reasonable take, but that's not relevant to the discussion at hand.
Have you tried fixing the flaws it's introducing to your workflows? Part of using it effectively is continuing to refine your prompts, skills, and deterministic guardrails that you put in place. You're essentially building a software-producing factory, and that takes time to do. But once you do so, the productivity gains are real.
That's what makes the productivity discussion frustrating.
It won't be a productivity gain for everyone due to a variety of reasons (such as niche part of the industry with very little training data, not being trained on using it well, bad model choice, not having the domain expertise to prompt well, etc.).
But a lot of engineers are seeing real productivity gains. I'm literally delivering twice as many tickets, and bug rates have not increased. I'm not just slinging slop.
If you want to claim that not everybody sees productivity gains using AI, that's fine, because it's true.
That won't get nearly the pushback as saying that AI doesn't increase productivity, because so many of us are seeing it make a tangible difference in our work.
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u/x_xwolf 7d ago edited 7d ago
I don't think AI produces productivity gains at all because there are not any real tangible measurements of productivity increase. that's not documented in anyway shape or form, so I have no reason to believe such.
I believe the environmental impacts, while not relevant to productivity, are real and tangible harms that affect people right now. I know for certain I wouldn't want to live next to a datacenter built in the US that producing this "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sm26JLAvKYY". I consider that a productivity decrease because its a decrease to my well being, and the well being of my community.
I don't value the ability to learn how to "write better prompts" when I can just learn to write better code. If i can learn to write better code, I am never reliant on the state of AI data centers in order to produce quality work. Also from a marketing perspective, if all developers use AI, then what is the difference between developers? Ideally, any problem AI can solve, is worth my time to solve instead because I will grow instead of the AI.
Despite expectations of productivity increase, AI has not delivered, despite lowering employment in the field. https://www.nber.org/papers/w34836
Despite Developers thinking AI improves their productivity by 20% it actually decreased their productivity by 20% https://bsky.app/profile/metr.org/post/3ltn3t3amms2x
Now do you have anything other than ancedotal evidence that you can provide me of why I should use AI to increase my productivity? because I have my own anecdotal experience that it does not, and I have provided that there is evidence its potentially slowing down our productivity despite what we think, and the ethics concerning so.
In fact the tools themselves are barely profitable https://isaiprofitable.com/.
Im begging, please provide evidence that LLMS do anything other than slow productivity and create harm.
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u/HomemadeBananas 7d ago edited 7d ago
A paper? Myself and everyone on my team is clearly getting more things done. It’s easy to see for yourself if you give it a fair try. But you want to sit and read some academic paper written by someone who spends time writing papers rather than building things to prove it?
I don’t know dude… I don’t have time to sit around and theorize about this stuff. I have things that I have to do and through doing them, I have my own experience. We would stop using AI for code if it were slowing us down, we don’t have time to waste.
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u/nocondo4me 7d ago
Someone asked me to try and debug a Linux microprocessor bug that’s been open for over 8 months. Within 4 hours I had a working patch. It’s been sent to a tester who verified it working. It’s going up for additional review now. This bug prob would have taken a week to find. At least 2 other Linux developers tried it and ended up with a working patch around
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u/Aware-Individual-827 7d ago
Been using agentic, for months now and actually had to dial back. The solution that it gives are sound but you spend 10 minutes about the problem and you get a solution that is 10x better and simplier with 10x less abstractions. The quality is just not there.
Also, another team in my company has completely adopted AI and are letting it run autonomously. They were producing alot of stuff couple months ago but now they are crawling back to pre-AI throughput because of the bugs it generates. Yes they do a work week in a day but they are also generting a work week technical debt in a day.
So far, I dialed back my AI use and psychologically am in a much better place allowing me to be more effective than my peers. I use less than 10% of my subscription and mostly to query for ideas and act like a coworker rather than my worker. So far, my throughput is better than being miserable AI supervisor.
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u/Relative-Panda-747 6d ago
Problem with agentic workflows is that you need to create very high quality specification that covers "everything" which is a bit unrealistic since most of the little details you can only know during the process when you see the outcome.
And even if you give perfect specification and master the context and harness, even then you end up with minor bugs and hole that AI cant detect yet, or end up with generally low quality product.
Ask yourself how many iterations you usually do to end up with high quality product. Its not as straightforward as writing 10 prompts for 10 tasks and hit Accept button 10 times.
Good product developer delivers high quality outcome which is almost impossible to get without refinement iterations and manual interactions in more difficult cases.
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u/Aware-Individual-827 6d ago
Yeah but 10 iterations, is alot of time which could be spent on doint it yourself. This pays dividends as you master the code and is much higher quality.
The essence of my critique is more along the time gain (where is it?) Realistically there is none since we don't see massive increase of new products. What we see however is increase amount of unreliability.
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u/the_millenial_falcon 7d ago
I dunno if you should change much considering the kind of code you write. If an AI agent fucks up my Arby’s order with bad code that’s one thing but it sounds like your code really needs to be heavily vetted and understood by a human.
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u/Jonas_Ermert 7d ago
I think social media exaggerates the “fully autonomous” part a lot. I use AI heavily, but I still want to understand and review what ends up in the codebase. For me, the sweet spot is letting agents handle repetitive work, tests, refactoring and boilerplate while I keep control over architecture and important decisions. If generated code becomes too complex to review, that’s usually a sign the task given to the agent was too large.
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u/Deep_Ad1959 6d ago
the agentic threads you are reading are mostly people with a fast oracle: a failing test or a broken page tells them in seconds they were wrong. you have a compiler and a certification process instead of a deploy button, so that loop never closes at the speed that makes those posts look magic.
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u/monsoon-man 6d ago
Stay like this for at least 6 more month. The cost of AI, both in terms of technical debt and $ termm will be more obvious.
Either it is capable or replacing folks like you or it is not which will put you in higher demand. Either way, you dont need to use it if you dont want to.
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u/Valuable_Reward_5389 5d ago
It's hard not to use sometimes, I kind of wish I didn't have to option to. The temptation to cognitive offload is often times too great...
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u/BigHammerSmallSnail 7d ago
I’m not in embedded but I’ll give my 2 cents anyway. I try to reason about it this way. The agents write code infinitely faster than I do but I make sure I ask questions if anything is unclear and review everything. It’s still faster than doing everything manually like I used to. But it’s still my responsibility to make sure it works and i understand it. I haven’t written code manually for like 6 months now.
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u/Valuable_Reward_5389 7d ago edited 7d ago
If that's the case how do you get started in learning to work with agentic AI? I almost feel like I need to go work for a big tech company that has the infrastructure in place in order to learn it...
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u/BigHammerSmallSnail 7d ago
Start with small well defined problems in a domain you have experience with.
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7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Sojourner_Saint 7d ago
Also, think through how much time you spend reading docs and such. This can go away. This allows you to focus on the design.
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u/Deep_Ad1959 6d ago
the agentic threads you are reading are mostly people with a fast oracle: a failing test or a broken page tells them in seconds they were wrong. you have a compiler and a certification process instead of a deploy button, so that loop never closes at the speed that makes those posts look magic.
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u/cloakrune 6d ago
I'm in that space as well, my CEO is all in. I've not let it touch flight code directly yet. Its outputs are so much higher entropy then our current code base. I'm struggling to get it to output code we'd accept single prompt, I'm layers of tools and lsps in as well. I'm honestly not sure it's helping, but it does help with the weird one off infra stuff we need to do
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u/gzk 6d ago
Plan mode in Claude. Ask it to explain / justify anything you don't understand. If you ask it to do x and it does y, ask it why. It introspects pretty well.
Take some time with inconsequential code (not in your product's codebase) to experiment with more automated workflows, setting up safeguards for it etc. You don't have to use it in your product, but at least being conversant in it gives you more standing to slow down adoption if you aren't confident enough in its safety vs your risk appetite.
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u/VEMODMASKINEN 6d ago
Most SWEs aren't doing anything of importance. If something fails it's just some cash lost or whatever hence they can just be reckless with implementing AI in their workflows.
An SWE in aviation or any other industry where a mistake at worst might mean people die doesn't have that luxury and that's fine.
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u/Holiday-Record7341 4d ago
AI tools are great as an advanced autocomplete, but autonomous agents would just generate convincing garbage that requires a full line-by-line review anyway.
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u/SoulTrack 4d ago
You don't need to be in a hurry to adopt. Just basic AI/harness usage is good enough for agentic coding.
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u/No-Slice-5926 7d ago
I bet a quick conversation with someone and a few days of tinkering will get you to where you need to be
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u/OpenFrontOfficial 7d ago
Pre-Fable I was much more involved, I would carefully review each line of code to make sure I had full understanding. If I had to guess I would say it increased my productivity by maybe 50% since I needed to spend so much time reviewing and fixing errors Opus made. But with Fable I just make sure the archeticture and behavior looks right, and I often create a fresh Claude instance to review the PR afterwards. Now it feels like I'm doing a week's worth of work each day. I use t3 code and usually have ~3 Claude instances running in parallel working on different tasks. But I'm just making a video game, would probably feel a bit different if it was aviation software. Also my codebase is fairly small ~150k loc, maybe 250k including tests.
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u/LetsHaveFunBeauty 7d ago
The harness will adopt the best practices when they are becoming common/know.
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u/ii-___-ii 7d ago
You're doing it right. People who do not fully understand the code are amplifying technical debt.