r/SoftwareEngineering • u/paddockson • 1h ago
Jevons Paradox and Agentic development
I'm a mid-level full-stack engineer in the UK, and I've been spearheading agentic AI development within my team. My senior and I have discussed AI extensively, and we're both torn. We love the technology, but we're concerned about its impact on software development.
Recently, I needed to update a critical service hosted on a VM, but testing it was an absolute ball ache. I asked Astra to build a CLI test harness that would generate files, send them to the service, and validate the results.
It got about 85–90% of the way there, but I had to finish parts manually. The code was also bloated as fuck. Program.cs alone was 230 lines for a simple CLI tool, despite me explicitly requesting separation of concerns and clean architecture.I ended up rewriting it using AI-assisted development through my IDE, where I could guide the implementation more closely. Ironically, I finished SO much quicker.
This led to an interesting discussion with my senior: if AI makes writing code cheaper and faster, will developers spend more time producing code or cleaning up the enormous amount of technical debt it creates?
I know some AI enthusiasts will argue that better prompts, detailed requirements, and design documents solve these problems. But in my eight years as an engineer, I've rarely received high-quality requirements or documentation. A significant part of my job involves reading between the lines, asking the right questions, and making judgement calls based on experience.
I suspect teaching developers how to use AI responsibly, maintain code quality, and control technical debt will become increasingly important.
Is this where the Jevons Paradox comes into play that we have partial discussing online for a little while now?
