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The role of developer skills in agentic coding

martinfowler.com

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Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#21

Post by yaj54 »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #18
timdellinger wrote: post #7

I find that I have to steer the AI a lot, but I do have optimism that better prompting will lead to better agents. To take an example from the article: code re-use. When I'm writing code, I subconsciously have a mental inventory of what code is already there, and I'm subconsciously asking myself "hey, is this new task super similar to something that we already have working (and tested!) code for?". I haven't looked i…

There are certain pieces of text that appear right before some of the greatest pieces of code ever written. For example, we've all heard of NASA code requirements. If you get the LLM into the "mindset" of a top-tier professional developer before getting it to spit out code, the code quality will reflect that. If your prompt is sloppy and poorly defined, you'll get copy-pasted StackOverflow code, since that's how most…

Can you share some examples of these certain pieces of text and greatest pieces of code?

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#23

Post by skydhash »

timdellinger wrote: post #7

I find that I have to steer the AI a lot, but I do have optimism that better prompting will lead to better agents. To take an example from the article: code re-use. When I'm writing code, I subconsciously have a mental inventory of what code is already there, and I'm subconsciously asking myself "hey, is this new task super similar to something that we already have working (and tested!) code for?". I haven't looked i…

This is one of the reasons I never needed to use LLMs. In any given codebase where you're experienced enough in the language and the framework/platform/libraries, more often than not, you're just copy-pasting code, or tab-completing (if you're in an IDE). The actual problems are more often solved on the sofa and with a lot of reading, then trying out hypothetical solutions.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#25

Post by drbojingle »

ariwilson wrote: post #10
mjr00 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a brand new project that you're trying to get done in a weekend--aka a weekend hackathon project--it's very doable. Would not recommend committing 7500 lines of code per day at your day job though.

If you work 8 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday and each line has on average 40 characters, then on average you have to type about 5 characters a second to hit 7000 lines of code. There's some heavy assumptions about boilerplate or autogenerated code going on in that estimate, as I don't think very many average 5 characters a second over 16 hours.

I write 1000 lines of code per second, bud. It's called ctrl+c and ctrl+v. In all seriousness, with autocompletion, snippets, and AI, I don't think you can measure this accurately in the way you're doing it.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#26

Post by mjr00 »

ariwilson wrote: post #10
mjr00 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a brand new project that you're trying to get done in a weekend--aka a weekend hackathon project--it's very doable. Would not recommend committing 7500 lines of code per day at your day job though.

If you work 8 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday and each line has on average 40 characters, then on average you have to type about 5 characters a second to hit 7000 lines of code. There's some heavy assumptions about boilerplate or autogenerated code going on in that estimate, as I don't think very many average 5 characters a second over 16 hours.

Haha, I appreciate the math, fair enough. We can change the caveat to "it's a project you worked on every weekend for a few months" if that helps. The point still stands that 15k LOC doesn't represent the type of codebases worked on by companies that employ multiple full-time software developers, much less long-lived enterprise codebases (which is Fowler's famed area of expertise, ironically).

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#27

Post by CyberDildonics »

jstanley wrote: post #8
mjr00 wrote: post #6

> 15k LOC codebase I wish articles about AI assistance would caveat this at the start. 15k LOC is a weekend hackathon project, which is all well and good, but not reflective of the work that 99% of developers are doing in their day jobs.

I, too, habitually write 7500 lines of code per day.

Post your github

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#29

Post by hnuser123456 »

yaj54 wrote: post #21
hnuser123456 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certain pieces of text that appear right before some of the greatest pieces of code ever written. For example, we've all heard of NASA code requirements. If you get the LLM into the "mindset" of a top-tier professional developer before getting it to spit out code, the code quality will reflect that. If your prompt is sloppy and poorly defined, you'll get copy-pasted StackOverflow code, since that's how most…

Can you share some examples of these certain pieces of text and greatest pieces of code?

Well, if you want safety-critical code, you could have the LLM read this before asking it to write its own code: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1642624

GP was pondering about code re-use. My typical use involves giving an entire file to the LLM and asking the LLM to give the entire file back implementing requested changes, so that it's forced to keep the full text in context and can't get too off-track by focusing on small sections of code when related changes might be needed in other parts of the file.

I think all of this is getting at the fact that an LLM won't spit out perfect code in response to a lazy prompt unless it's been highly post-trained to "reinterpret" sloppy prompts just as academically as academic prompts. Just like a human programmer, you can just give the programmer project descriptions and wait for the deliverable and accept it at face value, or you can join the programmer along their journey and verify their work is according to the standards you want. And sometimes there is no other way to get a hard project done.

Conversely, sometimes you can give very detailed specifications and the LLM will just ignore part of them over and over. Hopefully the training experts can continue to improve that.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#30

Post by johnjungles »

I actually think that most problems that took 5-20 mins are now a few minutes and it’s more about how many of those intense minutes and loops you’re going through.

Also, right now engineers are hyper optimized in the code aspects but not thinking about the context into cursor and context out of cursor.

Like the amount of copy paste from Notion / JIRA / Sentry and the amount of output like summarizing the git commits and PRs, slack and other “over communication” you have to do these days. This is the area I think we can more easily automate away.

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