What carries over from the old rockstar is that they produced faster than anyone else could follow, and whoever inherited the code paid for it later. An agent does the same without the ego. It’ll turn out a week of plausible-looking code in an afternoon, and the slow part becomes reading and understanding it rather than writing it. What’s worked for us is making the agent meet the standards before the code lands, a linter and a couple of runnable checks in the way, rather than trusting a reviewer to catch every miss when they’re forty files deep and tired.
what do they mean by “rockstart devs”? do they mean the people behind GTA?
The article itself gives a prtty good description. It’s a fairly common term, popularized over a decade ago, during the big tech startup boom, for a super-high-productivity developer. Someone who is just awesome at everything they do and can do everything, and do it all super quickly. I.E. a myth.
It’s not a myth, it works for a short while and is a recipe for burnout.
Well, it’s not a myth at the ‘do it super quickly’, usually it also meant that a prototype would then need a lot of polishing and that was even before LLMs ‘helped’
Sure. The myth is that you can the “awesome at everything” and “do it all super quickly” bits together at the same time.
I think they are referring to what they currently call full stack devs, which back around 2007-2009 they called them rockstar devs. It is stupid.
No, full-stack and rockstar were different.
Yeah sure if you say so. I guess you could have a front end dev who was a rockstar, but usually it implied you could handle anything and work on any team.
No. It’s a reference to super productive devs. The 10x devs. You can have unproductive full-stack developers and rockstar back end devs.
