Microwave Products

From a great sketch by comedian Ivan Decker, about the invention of the microwave. Paraphrasing:

Hey check out this invention. It cooks food really fast.

Does it do a good job?

No. Not even close. Leaves some parts ice cold, makes others burning hot, and if you put the wrong food in, it explodes.

I had to dig up the clip when I found more and more posts where people observe that, whether or not individual engineers claim increased productivity, or CEOs paint wildly optimistic pictures about what they can do with their team of 50 agents running in parallel, software isn't getting noticeably better. In fact, unchecked feature bloat, courtesy of AI, makes software worse: Slower and less reliable.

If coding agents are the tool of the future, and writes code really fast, we need to ask whether it does a good job, not at the level of lines of code delivered, but of the overall system.

If the outcome is subpar, the efficiency of how that outcome was produced is irrelevant.