Building ambitious software — Jonathan Kelley, Dioxus Labs & Cognition
Dioxus found that generating more Rust was easy but merging it was not. Agents paid off on bounded research and maintenance work when architecture, real-device tests, and line-by-line review stayed human-owned.
After generating **tens of thousands of lines of Rust**, the Dioxus team found that very little met its merge bar. A Kotlin and Swift plugin implementation arrived quickly, but the team spent **two to three weeks** building test cases and validating it on real devices.
Use agents where patience and broad technical recall matter: documentation research, debugging specifications, release checklists, backports, and documentation consistency. Keep architecture explicit, communicate intent precisely, and review shipped code line by line.
After generating **tens of thousands of lines of Rust**, the Dioxus team found that very little met its merge bar. A Kotlin and Swift plugin implementation arrived quickly, but the team spent **two to three weeks** building test cases and validating it on real devices. Use agents where patience and broad technical recall matter: documentation research, debugging specifications, release checklists, backports, and documentation consistency. Keep architecture explicit, communicate intent precisely, and review shipped code line by line. Test generation remains a weak point: agents can cover an API while missing the behavior that matters. The experience is from one foundational open-source project, so its workflow may not transfer directly, but its core constraint is clear: **code is cheap; quality is not**.
This supplies project-level evidence that generation throughput does not remove the engineering bottleneck; it moves effort into architecture, behavioral tests, device validation, and meticulous review. It reinforces bounded, verification-heavy agent workflows while sharpening a specific weakness: API-shaped generated tests may miss product behavior. The result also conflicts with proposals to replace line-level review wholesale, at least for foundational code under a strict merge bar.