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Why agents are bad pair programmers

justin.searls.co

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Re: Why agents are bad pair programmers

#181

Post by hnthrow90348765 »

woah wrote: post #175
globnomulous wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In essence, I need to schedule a meeting with the LLM and 'hammer out a game plan.' Gotta make sure we're 'in sync' and everybody's 'on the same page.' Meeting-based programming. No wonder management loves it and thinks it should be the future.

LLMs are stealing the jobs of developers who go off half-cocked and spend three days writing 2000 lines of code implementing the wrong feature instead of attending a 30 minute meeting

That's dumb, of course, but sometimes people really just do the bare minimum to describe what they want and they can only think clearly once there's something in front of them. The 2000 lines there should be considered a POC, even at 2000 lines.

Re: Why agents are bad pair programmers

#183

Post by icedchai »

dkersten wrote: post #177
icedchai wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I always wait for it to finish with my workflow.

It does it even if I wait for it to finish, but don't accept. Eg: Starting code: a quick brown fox prompt 1: "Capitalize the words" AI: A Quick Brown Fox I don't accept or reject, but change it to "A Quick Red Fox" prompt 2: "Change it to dog" AI: A Quick Brown Dog

Do you tell it to reread the file? Seems like the updates aren't in the context.

Re: Why agents are bad pair programmers

#184

Post by ge96 »

devmor wrote: post #180
woah wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are stealing the jobs of developers who go off half-cocked and spend three days writing 2000 lines of code implementing the wrong feature instead of attending a 30 minute meeting

and the jobs of developers that want to schedule another breakout session to discuss the pros and cons of a 2-line change.

Yeah... I'm gonna need to circle back on that

Re: Why agents are bad pair programmers

#185

Post by ta12653421 »

bakkoting wrote: post #166
Traster wrote: post #120

I think this has put into words a reason why I bounced off using AI this way, when I need something done I often have a rough idea of how I want it done, and how AI does it often doesn't match what I want, but because it's gone off and written a 2,000 lines of code it's suddenly more work for me to go through and say "Ok, so first off, strip all these comments out, you're doubling the file with trivial explanations o…

Anthropic's guide to using Claude Code [1] is worth reading. Specifically, their recommended workflow is "first ask it to read the code, then ask it to make a plan to implement your change, then tell it to execute". That sounds like the workflow you're asking for - you can read its plan and make adjustments before it writes a single line of code. One of the weird things about using agents is that if they're doing thi…

good one!

I#m wondering how some can complain about ClaudeAI: - its actually enlightening - it saves a lot of time - by intuition, i did whats written in this blog from the beginning on

YES: - sometimes the solution is rubish because i can see that its "randomly" is connecting/integrating stuff - ...but: In about 95% of the cases the output is exactly what i asked for

Re: Why agents are bad pair programmers

#186

Post by ta12653421 »

ozim wrote: post #134
Traster wrote: post #120

I think this has put into words a reason why I bounced off using AI this way, when I need something done I often have a rough idea of how I want it done, and how AI does it often doesn't match what I want, but because it's gone off and written a 2,000 lines of code it's suddenly more work for me to go through and say "Ok, so first off, strip all these comments out, you're doubling the file with trivial explanations o…

At the start of prompt before project requirements I copy paste paragraph about the code I want. No emojis, no comments, no console log statements, no read me file, no error handling. Act as a senior developer working with other experienced developers. Otherwise it happily generates bunch of trash that is unreadable. Error handling generated will most of the times just hide errors instead of actually dealing with the…

initial prompting like this has a huge impact, yes.

also: I clean the chat and start over sometimes, because results may differ.

Re: Why agents are bad pair programmers

#187

Post by icedchai »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #20
soulofmischief wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deep work cannot be achieved by chatting with the coding bots, sorry. ...by you. Meanwhile, plenty of us have found a way to enhance our productivity during deep work. No need for the patronization.

I don't believe you experience deep work the same way I do then In my mind you cannot do deep work while being interrupted constantly, and LLM agents are constant interruptions

We're getting constantly interrupted with Slack messages, Zoom meetings, emails, Slack messages about checking said emails, etc. At least an LLM isn't constantly pinging you for updates (yet?) - you can get back to it whenever.

Re: Why agents are bad pair programmers

#188

Post by thunspa »

almosthere wrote: post #45
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #38

I've been considering a... protocol? for improving this. Consider this repo: foo.py bar.py bar.py.vibes.md This would indicate that foo.py is human-written (or at least thoroughly reviewed by a human), while bar.py is LLM written with a lower bar of human scrutiny. bar.py.vibes.md would contain whatever human-written guidance describes how bar should look. It could be an empty file, or a few paragraphs, or it it coul…

I think coding will eventually go away in favor of models with metadata built around them. How many times did you have a mutation operation where you had to hand code the insert of 3 or 4 entities and make sure they all come back successful, or you back out properly (and perhaps this is without a transaction, perhaps over multiple databases). Make sure the required fields are present Grab the created inserted ID Rins…

In writing the code that is supposed to implement my idea, I find that my idea has many flaws.

Sending that idea to an LLM (in absence of AGI) seems like a great way to find out about the flaws too late.

Otherwise, specifying an application in such detail as to obtain the same effect is essentially coding, just in natural language, which is less precise.

Re: Why agents are bad pair programmers

#189

Post by cadr »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #152
searls wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gist an example of what you mean? My experience with very large prompts and exacting custom instructions has been drastically eroded "intelligence"

Many of my prompts include _somewhat_ sensitive details because they're tailor-made for each project. This is a more generic prompt I've been using for my code generation tool: https://gist.github.com/tobyhinloopen/e567d551c9f30390b23a0a... More about this prompt: https://bonaroo.nl/2025/05/20/enforced-ai-test-driven-develo... Lately, I've been letting the agent write the prompt by ordering it to "update the prompt d…

I guess it is tool-dependent, but do you pass in that enormous prompt on each request?

Re: Why agents are bad pair programmers

#190

Post by apwell23 »

34679 wrote: post #146
Traster wrote: post #120

I think this has put into words a reason why I bounced off using AI this way, when I need something done I often have a rough idea of how I want it done, and how AI does it often doesn't match what I want, but because it's gone off and written a 2,000 lines of code it's suddenly more work for me to go through and say "Ok, so first off, strip all these comments out, you're doubling the file with trivial explanations o…

Just like with human engineers, you need to start with a planning session. This involves a back and forth discussion to hammer out the details before writing any code. I start off as vague as possible to see if the LLM recommends anything I hadn't thought of, then get more detailed as I go. When I'm satisfied, I have it create 2 documents, initialprompt.txt and TODO.md. The initial prompt file includes a summary of t…

> This ensures the LLM has a complete understanding of the overall goals

Forget about overall goal. I have this simple instruction that i send on every request

"stop after every failing unit test and discuss implementation with me before writing source code "

but it only does that about 7 times out of 10. Other times it just proceeds with implementation anyways.

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