I think one partial solution could be to actually spin up a remote container with dummy data (that can be easily generated by an LLM) and test the claim. With agents it can be done very quickly. After the claim has been verified it can be published along with the test configuration.
LOC is a very-very weak proxy of "how many new features" I've built, and they don't have any other metric that can be measured easily. But it causes serious issues, because equating LOC with productivity leads to inevitable utter bloat, that no agent or human can ever rectify in a meaningful timeframe. I'm pretty sure this 600 000??? LOC could be shrinked to 60 K for the same feature set, but with better readability and performance.
Others have already partially answered this, but here’s my 20 cents. Software development really is similar to architecture. The end result is an infrastructure of unique modules with different type of connectors (roads, grid, or APIs). Until now in SW dev the grunt work was done mostly by the same people who did the planning, decided on the type of connectors, etc. Real estate architects also use a bunch of software tools to aid them, but there must be a human being in the end of the chain who understands human needs, understands - after years of studying and practicing - how the whole building and the infrastructure will behave at large and who is ultimately responsible for the end result (and hopefully rewarded depending on the complexity and quality of the end result). So yes we will not need as many SW engineers, but those who remain will work on complex rewarding problems and will push the frontier further.
The "grunt work" is in many cases just that. As long as it's readable and works it's fine.
But there are a substantial amount cases where this isn't true. The nitty gritty is then the important part and it's impossible to make the whole thing work well without being intimate with the code.
So I never fully bought into the clean separation of development, engineering and architecture.
Architecture is fine for big, complex projects. Having everything planned out before keeps cost down, and ensures customer will not come with late changes. But if cost are expected to be low, and there's no customer, architecture is overkill.
It's like making a movie without following the script line by line (watch Godard in Novelle Vague), or building it by yourself or by a non-architect. 2x faster, 10x cheaper.
You immediately see an inflexible overarchitectured project.
You can do fine by restricting the agent with proper docs, proper tests and linters.
Managed BYOK stateless agent orchestrator called BeeZee: https://beezyai.net/. Basically Claude Cowork / a coding agent on the web but provider agnostic, you own the data and you can connect several nodes to it. Instead of installing an agent for all your machines you have one master agentic server and executor nodes. The server is stateless the data lives on the nodes and in a managed database. I use Supabase and Google KMS so my auth keys are encrypted. Uses Pi agent under the hood. This enables me to code from my phone without a dedicated SSH terminal and without the need to babysit the agent. I describe the feature, off it goes, I close my phone and in 10 mins the results are there. Also using it to support my wife with white collar stuff like Excel analysis, translation, etc. It's a bit buggy but getting better.
I have a lawyer friend who’s complaining about versioning… but she also mentioned that Word is the de facto standard. What I’m trying to say is that this should be a Word addon.
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