Coding agents are accelerating different types of software work to different…
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Coding agents are accelerating different types of software work to different degrees. When we architect teams, understanding these distinctions helps us to have realistic expectations. Listing functions from most accelerated to least, my order is: frontend development, backend, infrastructure, and research. Frontend development — say, building a web page to serve descriptions of products for an ecommerce site — is dramatically sped up because coding agents are fluent in popular frontend languages like TypeScript and JavaScript and frameworks like React and Angular. Additionally, by examining what they have built by operating a web browser, coding agents are now very good at closing the loop and iterating on their own implementations. Granted, LLMs today are still weak at visual design, but given a design (or if a polished design isn’t important), the implementation is fast! Backend development — say, building APIs to respond to queries requesting product data — is harder. It takes more work by human developers to steer modern models to think through corner cases that might lead to subtle bugs or security flaws. Further, a backend bug can lead to non-intuitive downstream effects…
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Faster code generation changes a project's pace most when writing and checking code dominate the work. In his account of using coding agents, Andrew Ng says frontend implementation benefits strongly because agents can inspect pages in a browser and iterate. Research still involves choosing hypotheses, running experiments, and interpreting results; generating the experiment's code speeds up only part of that process. He reports smaller gains for backend and infrastructure work than for frontend work, too. This is his experience-based framework for setting team expectations, with the remaining bottleneck determining how much faster delivery becomes.
- AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
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