Linear CEO: Don’t fantasize about AI taking over engineering; code agents only add bandwidth

robot
Abstract generation in progress
AIMPACT message, April 27 (UTC+8). According to @Beating@ monitoring, Linear CEO Karri Saarinen published a long post discussing the real progress of AI tools, saying that agentic coding (a programming approach where AI agents participate in planning, writing code, debugging, and submitting) has already become fairly common. Linear’s own data also shows this shift: most paid workspaces have installed code agents, and related usage activity has grown more than 5x within a few months; as for Linear’s own cloud code agents alone, they have already fixed more than 1,000 issues per month and are still growing rapidly. Saarinen’s assessment of this wave of change is fairly restrained. He says that almost nobody privately claims that agents can write 100% of the code, and it’s also rare to hear about real companies running large-scale, fully independent agent clusters. Engineers still need to provide direction, constraints, and judgment; usually they can only manage a handful of local agents at the same time, then put a small number of cloud agents in the background to handle minor fixes. He summarizes AI’s main impact on programming as “increasing bandwidth”: problems that used to be too small, too annoying, or too time-consuming are now easier to handle on the spot; but genuinely difficult problems have not been accelerated to the same extent, and they still require understanding the system, weighing trade-offs, and deciding what should exist. Saarinen also believes that AI won’t make planning lose its value. With build costs going down, it’s also easier to do the wrong thing; teams still need to decide what’s most important—only that planning cycles should become shorter, and more room should be left for experiments. (Source: BlockBeats)
View Original
This page may contain third-party content, which is provided for information purposes only (not representations/warranties) and should not be considered as an endorsement of its views by Gate, nor as financial or professional advice. See Disclaimer for details.
  • Reward
  • Comment
  • Repost
  • Share
Comment
Add a comment
Add a comment
No comments
  • Pinned