Speed Of Ai Agents
Recently I was lucky enough to run an experiment of developing a project using purely AI tools.
Instead of a team of developers it was only me, with AI tools of my choice.
At the moment the experiment is 4 months old :) and continues, with pure effort spent on this project I'd say at least 3 months and 1 week.
There were complications involving me needing to touch other services within the company codebase, owned by other teams, some of them critical like payments, which took a good piece of overall timeline, but the core is a single service with front pages, auth hidden pages, admin, some internal APIs, workers and cron jobs.
So pretty much typical project.
At some point in time I started to doubt whether I output results at the full possible speed.
A lot of people saying that they did with AI something x10 faster than it would be done without before, so reasonably this project shouldn't take 40 developer/months without using AI agents. I changed approaches and AI tools during this experiment, and at the moment I have a setup where I'm fully dedicated to review of that gigantic AI output and I cannot find where I can find x2..3...4...etc speedup.
And while measuring of the development speed is something that's not solved well in the industry at the moment I still want to try to compare a process before heavily relying on AI agents and current approaches in terms of how much time it saves.
Typical approaches taken in the organization to measure velocity wouldn't work here as I do not have story points, estimations in hours, team, etc.. So I'll try to measure a one task purely relying on my understanding of my process of development with AI agents and without.