I became hyper attentive to iteration speeds as a result. This is not just something a human runs into, the agent runs into it even more because it loves to run tests etc. The quicker that goes, the more efficient the agent is. Obviously the same should be true for humans but because the agent doesn't make breaks quite like a human does, it becomes more noticeable.
It gets me frustrated. Here you are one second flying, in the zone, moving from concept to concept at faster than human speeds; and then boof, you have to pull up some random api doc, open postman, test the api, come back to the chat console, etc...
Overly verbose codebases are not great for agents in my experience because they confuse them greatly and make refactoring hard. However codebases that I find to work really well with agents are quite lite on abstractions and I always felt that this is the right way to build software for humans too.
I have a lot of functions, I pass a lot of data, I embrace a lot of thread local state and this works really well for both humans and AI to understand what is going on.
But here is where agents and humans both agree: quick and easy tooling. Make it easy to iterate on a test, make it easy to manage resources, make the iteration cycle as quick as possible. I'm writing this as my partner's job forces iteration cycles of minutes on her. No agent can do better in that space than a human.
I became hyper attentive to iteration speeds as a result. This is not just something a human runs into, the agent runs into it even more because it loves to run tests etc. The quicker that goes, the more efficient the agent is. Obviously the same should be true for humans but because the agent doesn't make breaks quite like a human does, it becomes more noticeable.