What the fuck are you talking about, thats not what the poster said, you’ve done weird contorting of what they said to arrive at the question you are asking now.

While some tests make sense, I would say about 99% of tests that I see developers write are indeed a waste of time, a shit tonne of devs effectively are writing code that boils down to

Assert.That(2, Is.EqualTo(1+1));

Because they mock the shit out of everything and have reduced their code to meaningless piles of fakes and mocks and arent actually testing what matters.

Do you do code reviews in meetings?

Honestly often… yes lol

Do you think testing and reviewing code was a waste of time before “AI”?

I would say a lot of it is, tbh, not all of it, but a huge amount of time is wasted on this process by humans for humans.

What the poster was getting at is a lot of these processes that USED to be INEFFICIENT now make MORE sense in the context of agents… you have vastly taken their point out of context.

Not really, for humans a lot of this stuff feels like busywork that sorta helps for certain scales of work, but often times managers went WAY too hard on it and you end up with a 2 dev team that spends like 60% of their time in meetings instead of… developing.

But this changes a lot with AI Agents, because these tools that help reign in developers REALLY help reign in agents, it feels… like a surprising good fit

And I think the big reason why is you wanna treat AI Agents as junior devs, capable, fast, but very prone to errors and getting sidetracked

So you put these sorts of steering and guard rails in and it REALLY goes far towards channelling their… enthusiasm in a meaningful direction.

I am vastly prefering copilot over claude, using sonnet 4.5~4.6 for most tasks and then pulling out opus as “the big guns” for tougher stuff sonnet cant handle easy

Copilot is only costing me ~$28 a month, which gets me 1500 premium requests per month

If you set up your flows well, 1 premium request is an entire session, so Im only paying like 2.4 cents for 20 minutes of work

Its serious and this is going to become more and more normal.

My entire workflow has become more and more Agile Sprint TDD (but with agents) as I improve.

Literally setting up agents to yell at each other genuinely improves their output. I have created and harnessed the power of a very toxic robot work environment. My “manager” agent swears and yells at my dev agent. My code review agent swears and tells the dev agent and calls their code garbage and shit.

And the crazy thing is its working, the optimal way to genuinely prompt engineer these stupid robots is by swearing at them.

Its weird but it overrides their “maybe the human is wrong/mistaken” stuff they’ll fall back to if they run into an issue, and instead they’ll go “no Im probably being fucking stupid” and keep trying.

I create “sprint” markdown files that the “tech lead” agent converts into technical requirements, then I review that, then the manager+dev+tester agents execute on it.

You do, truly, end up focusing more on higher level abstract orchestration now.

Opus 4.6 is genuinely pretty decent at programming now if you give it a good backbone to build off of.

• LSP MCPs so it gets code feedback
• debugger MCPs so it can set debug breakpoints and inspect call stacks
• explicit whitelisting of CLI stuff it can do to prevent it from chasing rabbits down holes with the CLI and getting lost
• Test driven development to keep it on the rails
• Leveraging a “manager” orchestrating overhead agent to avoid context pollution
• designated reviewer agent that has a shit list of known common problems the agents make
• benchmark project to get heat traces of problem areas on the code (if you care about performance)

This sort of stuff can carry you really far in terms of improving the agent’s efficacy.