Lack of reuse
AI-generated code sometimes lacks modularity, making it difficult to apply the same approach elsewhere in the application.
Example: Not realising that a UI component is already implemented elsewhere, and therefore creating duplicate code.
Example: Use of inline CSS styles instead of CSS classes and variables
The role of developer skills in agentic coding
31–40 of 204 posts
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#32I use LLMs for various purposes in day to day development. I don't use any of the tools mentioned in the article because I'm using intellij and don't want to replace a tool that has lots of stuff that I use all the time. But aside from that, it's good advice and matches my experience.
I've dabbled with plugins for intellij but wasn't really happy with those. But ever since chat gpt for desktop started interfacing directly with jetbrains products (and vs code as well), that's my goto tool. I realized that I like being able to pull that up with a simple keybinding and it auto connects to the IDE when I do. I don't need to replace my tools and I get to have AI support ready to go. Most of the existing plugins seem to insist on some crappy auto complete, which in a tool that offers a lot of auto complete features already is a bit of an anti feature. I don't need clippy style autocomplete.
What matters here is the tool integration, not the model quality. Better tool integration means better prompts with less work and getting better answers that way.
Example: I run a test, it fails with some output. I had this yesterday. So I asked, "why is this failing" and had a short discussion about what could be wrong. No need for me to specify any detail; all extracted from the IDE. We ticked off a few possible causes, I excluded them. And then it noticed a subtle change in the log messages that I had not noticed (a co-routine context switch) that turned out to be the root cause.
That kind of open ended debugging is a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes it finds stuff. Mostly it just starts proposing solutions based on a poor analysis of the problem.
What works pretty reliably is:
- address the TODOs / FIXMEs, especially if you give it some examples of what you expect
- write documentation (very good for this)
- evaluate if I covered all the edge cases (often finds stuff I want to fix)
- simple code transformations (rewrite this using framework X instead of Y)
I don't trust it blindly. But it's generally giving me good code and feedback. And I get to outsource a lot of the boring crap.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#33Is Martin Fowler now just renting out space on his website?
What are you referring to?
GP was apparently unaware until now that martinfowler.com has basically been a blog/article hosting site (though more in the highly curated sense than a generic hosting site, more akin to a trade publication) for the last couple decades and that not all the content is written by Martin Fowler himself. The author of this piece is Birgitta Böckeler.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#34Great, so now instead of spending 8 hours writing code, I spend 8 hours "steering" an AI to write the same code. What a fucking win (for the AI companies and no one else.)
Then don't
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#35Is Martin Fowler now just renting out space on his website?
right!? It was a little misleading that the article was written by someone else. (Birgitta Böckeler)
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#36I've been playing around with vibe coding and I think a lot of the issues brought up could be fixed by an architecture abstraction layer that does not exist today. My idea would be something like an architecture-graph (Archigraph working title) that would recursively describe how an application works or should work. Then when an agentic coder is doing a task they can easily see the bigger picture of how an application works and hopefully writing better code. Anyone interested in working on this with me?
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#37Earlier 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.
I'm sorry but unless you count framework bootstraps for models and configs and stuff like that as "coding" nobody is legitimately writing 7500 lines in a day. At my most productive, powering through real problems, debugging issues and making stuff solid, I've hit ~3500 with marathon code sessions and ChatGPT. I've seen industry leaders and competitive coders in action, and none of them were significantly faster - any…
Everyone is missing the point. Fine, maybe the math is off and it took 3 days instead of 2.
The issue is that Cursor tends to be demoed for incredibly small, green, and simple projects.
Most of us are working on codebases with at least over 10 million lines. I would love an AI agent that can massive infrastructure migrations with only a bit of oversight. Didn’t Shopify do something like that recently?
I think this is still an area that needs a lot of work.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#38I don't really like AI in IDE. I don't want them to think for me. Code completion and Intellisense is good enough.
That said, I think there are 3 items that are important:
- Quickly grasp a new framework or a new language. People might expect you to do so because of AI's help. 2 weeks might be the maximum, instead of the minimum. The same for juniors.
- Focus on the real important things. So instead of trying to memorize a shell script you are going to use a couple of times per year, maybe use the time to learn something more fundamental. You can also use AI to help you to bootstrap the learning. If you need something for interviews, spend a week to memorize them.
- Be willing to exclude AI from your thought process. If you rely AI on everything, including algorithms and designs, this might impact your understanding.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#39I use Cursor for most of my development these days. This article aligns pretty closely with my experiences. A few additional observations: 1. Anecdotally, AI agents feel stuck somewhere circa ~2021. If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago. This is incredibly frustrating to watch and correct for. Providing explicit instructions for which pac…
> It feels like my AI agents are stuck somewhere circa ~2021. If I install newer packages or more recent versions, Claude will often revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago.
My experience is the same, though the exact dates differ.
I assume LLMs gravitate toward solutions that are most represented in their training material. It's hard to keep them pulled toward newer versions without explicitly mentioning it all the time.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#40I've been using Claude to help write a complex prototype for game dev. Overall it's been a big productivity boost. However as the project has grown Claude has gotten much worse. I'm nearing 15k lines and it's borderline more trouble than it's worth. Even when it was helpful, it needed a _lot_ of guidance from me. Almost more helpful as a "rubber ducky" and for the fact that it kept me from deadlocking on analysis. That said, discussing problems and solutions with Claude often does keep things moving and sometimes reveals unexpected solutions.
If Claude could write the code directly unsupervised, it would go wild and produce a ton of garbage. At least if the code it writes in the browser is any indication. It's not that it's all bad, but it's like a very eager junior dev -- potentially dangerous!
Imagining a codebase that is one or two orders of magnitude larger, I think Claude would be useless. Imagining a non-expert driving the process, I think Claude would generate a very rickety proof of concept then fall over. All that said, I wish I had this tool when developing my previous game. Especially for a green field project, it feels like having access to the internet versus pulling reference manuals -- a big force multiplier.