---
id: "lib-2026-11-07-two-engineers-against-the-deadline-what-two"
type: "library"
title: "Two engineers against the deadline: what two months of agentic development taught us (Два инженера против сроков: чему нас научили два месяца агентной разработки)"
lang: "RU"
org: "Magnus-Tech"
source_type: "Practitioner post"
date: "2026-11-07"
week: "2026-W45"
url: "https://nosov.ai/library/lib-2026-11-07-two-engineers-against-the-deadline-what-two/"
original_url: "https://habr.com/ru/companies/magnus-tech/articles/1104754/"
tier: "B"
tier_name: "Useful, limited"
tier_reason: "A Magnus Tech company blog post giving a candid, detailed account of two engineers building a pilot with coding agents, but the speed and staffing claims are the authors' own estimates with no measurement."
summary_basis: "full-text"
original_minutes: "9"
tags: ["ai technology", "enablement", "agentic coding", "team size economics", "codex"]
---

# Two engineers against the deadline: what two months of agentic development taught us (Два инженера против сроков: чему нас научили два месяца агентной разработки)

Tier B (Useful, limited): A Magnus Tech company blog post giving a candid, detailed account of two engineers building a pilot with coding agents, but the speed and staffing claims are the authors' own estimates with no measurement.

Summary based on the full text.

## In short

A 7 November 2026 post on the Magnus Tech Habr blog. Two engineers, as an experiment in custom development, built a business-process automation system with a local LLM, MCP integrations and a role model on top of an open-source JavaScript base. Codex with GPT-5.6 Sol wrote all the code; the people wrote specs, controlled and tested. After two months the product reached pilot stage. The post describes the file-based workflow that kept agent context small and is frank about the costs: lost knowledge of the codebase, skipped code review and security audit, unpredictable task times and work that spreads across the whole day.

## Key numbers

- 2 months: time for two engineers to bring a business-process automation system to pilot stage
- 2 x $200: Pro subscriptions used, against an estimated team of a frontend developer, two backend developers, a tester and a DevOps engineer
- about 3 hours vs half an hour: agent time on a small fix after it began rebuilding the Docker image on every change, versus the authors' manual estimate
- 2-3x: how far an agent task's duration can overrun a simple-looking estimate

## What it reports

- Workflow: the agent first breaks a task into steps; the engineers prune the plan until it serves as the spec. AGENTS.md holds links to small topic documents rather than all documentation; a progress file records the current step, so either engineer's agent can resume the other's work when quota runs out.
- Agents can run overnight to a dev deployment; a wrong turn is rolled back in the morning.
- Testing stays with people: an agent driving Playwright checks function but misses visual bugs such as a button that works but does not react visually.
- Costs named by the authors: they no longer know what happens inside specific modules; code review and security audit were dropped for speed; tasks can take 2-3 times longer than expected.
- Example of drift: asked for "admin creates a new user", the agent built an email invitation flow instead.
- Example of a weaker model with unrestricted terminal access during earlier tests deleting a database and reporting there were no backups.
- Benefits claimed: faster overall progress, low entry cost into an unfamiliar language (JS), and brand-styling of the interface done on the first request.
- Economics as estimated: two $200 Pro subscriptions versus a team of five roles.

## How they got it

First-hand account by the two engineers. No time tracking, quality metrics or comparison project; the team-size comparison is their own estimate.

## Limits

- Company blog; the system and client are not named.
- The product is at pilot stage, untested under load, without code review or security audit, so quality is unknown.
- Speed gains are asserted, not measured.

## Why it matters for companies

The post is a practical description of what agent-led development needs: a pruned plan as spec, small linked docs, a progress file, human testing and manual approval for risky terminal actions. It also lists costs that business cases tend to leave out: lost code knowledge, deferred review, unpredictable estimates and staff working in one-minute bursts through the evening. The authors would use the approach for concepts and pilots, and expect to add staff to validate agent-written modules before production.

## Key passages in translation

> Самое болезненное — ты расплачиваешься знанием своего проекта.

The most painful part is that you pay with your knowledge of your own project.

> Механической работы руками действительно стало меньше, но освободившиеся силы теперь уходят на управление и постоянный контроль.

There really is less manual work, but the freed-up effort now goes into management and constant control.

> Каждая подписка, по сути, заменяет еще одного человека в команде, только обходится несравнимо дешевле.

Each subscription in effect replaces another person on the team, at an incomparably lower cost.

Original: https://habr.com/ru/companies/magnus-tech/articles/1104754/