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How I program with agents

crawshaw.io

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171–180 of 308 posts

Re: How I program with agents

#171

Post by dml2135 »

johnfn wrote: post #155
Wilduck wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another way to look at this is you’re outsourcing your understanding to something that ultimately doesn’t think. You read this quote wrong. Senior devs outsource _work_ to junior engineers, not _understanding_. The way they became senior in the first place is by not outsourcing work so they could develop their understanding.

I read the quote just fine. I don't understand 100% of what my junior engineers do. I understand a good chunk, like 90-95% of it, but am I really going to spend 30 minutes trying to understand why that particular CSS hack only works with `rem` and not `px`? Of course not - if I did that for every line of code, I'd never get anything done.

You are moving goalposts significantly here -- a small CSS hack is a far cry from your docker infrastructure.

Re: How I program with agents

#172

Post by dml2135 »

johnfn wrote: post #144
ofjcihen wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing apples to oranges in your response but I’ll address it anyway. I see this take brought up quite a bit and it’s honestly just plain wrong. For starters Junior engineers can be held accountable. What we see currently is people leaving gaping holes in software and then pointing at the LLM which is an unthinking tool. Not the same. Juniors can and should be taught as that is what causes them to progress not onl…

> For starters Junior engineers can be held accountable. What we see currently is people leaving gaping holes in software and then pointing at the LLM which is an unthinking tool. Not the same. This is no different than, say, the typical anecdote of a junior engineer dropping the database. Should the junior be held accountable? Of course not - it's the senior's fault for allowing that to happen at the first place. If…

> This is no different than, say, the typical anecdote of a junior engineer dropping the database. Should the junior be held accountable? Of course not - it's the senior's fault for allowing that to happen at the first place. If the junior is held accountable, that would more be an indication of poor software engineering practices.

Of course the junior should be held accountable, along with the senior. Without accountability, what incentive do they have to not continue to fuck up?

Dropping the database is an extreme example because it's pretty easy to put in checks that should make that impossible. But plenty of times I've seen juniors introduce avoidable bugs simply because they did not bother to test their code -- that is where teaching accountability is a vital part of growth as an engineer.

Re: How I program with agents

#173

Post by [deleted] »

pineaux wrote: post #133
dataviz1000 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've actively paired with multiple people at once That was my favorite part of being a professional cook, working closely on a team. Humans are social animals who haven't -- including how our brains are wired -- changed much physiologically in the past 25,000 years. Smart people today are not much smarter than smart people in Greece 3,000 years ago, except for the sample size of 8B people being larger. We are wired…

I have always found this idea of not being smarter somewhat baffling. Education makes people smarter does it not? At least that is one of the claims it makes. Do you mean that a baby hunter gatherer from 25000 years ago would be on average just as capable of learning stuff when integrated into society compared to someone born nowadays? For human beings 25.000 years is something like 1000 generations. There will be su…

[deleted]

Re: How I program with agents

#174

Post by lurking_swe »

pineaux wrote: post #133
dataviz1000 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've actively paired with multiple people at once That was my favorite part of being a professional cook, working closely on a team. Humans are social animals who haven't -- including how our brains are wired -- changed much physiologically in the past 25,000 years. Smart people today are not much smarter than smart people in Greece 3,000 years ago, except for the sample size of 8B people being larger. We are wired…

I have always found this idea of not being smarter somewhat baffling. Education makes people smarter does it not? At least that is one of the claims it makes. Do you mean that a baby hunter gatherer from 25000 years ago would be on average just as capable of learning stuff when integrated into society compared to someone born nowadays? For human beings 25.000 years is something like 1000 generations. There will be su…

i think the premise is if we plucked the average baby from 25,000 years and transported them magically into the present day, into a loving and nurturing environment, they would be just as “smart” as you and i.

Re: How I program with agents

#175

Post by j-wang »

rgbrenner wrote: post #68
zOneLetter wrote: post #7

Maybe it's because I only code for my own tools, but I still don't understand the benefit of relying on someone/something else to write your code and then reading it, understand it, fixing it, etc. Although asking an LLM to extract and find the thing I'm looking for in an API Doc is super useful and time saving. To me, it's not even about how good these LLMs get in the future. I just don't like reading other people's…

if you work on a team most code you see isn’t yours.. ai code review is really no different than reviewing a pr… except you can edit the output easier and maybe get the author to fix it immediately

I was about to say exactly this—it's not really that different from managing a bunch of junior programmers. You outline, they implement, and then you need to review certain things carefully to make sure they didn't do crazy things.

But yes, these juniors take minutes versus days or weeks to turn stuff around.

Re: How I program with agents

#176

Post by munificent »

silverlake wrote: post #96
zOneLetter wrote: post #7

Maybe it's because I only code for my own tools, but I still don't understand the benefit of relying on someone/something else to write your code and then reading it, understand it, fixing it, etc. Although asking an LLM to extract and find the thing I'm looking for in an API Doc is super useful and time saving. To me, it's not even about how good these LLMs get in the future. I just don't like reading other people's…

You’re clinging to an old model of work. Today an LLM converted my docker compose infrastructure to Kubernetes, using operators and helm charts as needed. It did in 10 minutes what would take me several days to learn and cobble together a bad solution. I review every small update and correct it when needed. It is so much more productive. I’m driving a tractor while you are pulling an ox cart.

> would take me several days to learn ... correct it when needed.

If you haven't learned how all this stuff works, how are you able to be confident in your corrections?

> I’m driving a tractor while you are pulling an ox cart.

Are you sure you haven't just duct taped a jet engine to your ox cart?

Re: How I program with agents

#177

Post by sanderjd »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #10
voidUpdate wrote: post #4

I wonder how many people that use agents actually like "programming", as in coming up with a solution to the problem and then being able to express that in code. It seems like a lot of the work that the agents are doing is removing that and instead making you have to explain what you want in natural language and hope the LLM doesn't introduce bugs

I like writing code, and it definitely isn't satisfying when an LLM can one-shot a parser that I would have had fun building for hours. But at the same time, building a parser for hours is also a distraction from my higher level ambitions with the project, and I get to focus on those. I still get to stub out the types and function signatures I want, but the LLM can fill them in and I move on. More likely I'll even ha…

This is exactly my take as well!

I do really like programming qua programming, and I relate to a lot of the lamentation I see from people in these threads at the devaluation of this skill.

But there are lots of other things that I also enjoy doing, and these tools are opening up so many opportunities now. I have had tons of ideas for things I want to learn how to do or that I want to build that I have abandoned because I concluded they would require too much time. Not all, but many, of those things are now way easier to do. Tons of things are now under the activation energy to make them worthwhile, which were previously well beyond it.

Just as a very narrow example, I've been taking on a lot more large scale refactorings to make little improvements that I've always wanted to make, but which have not previously been worth the effort, but now are.

Re: How I program with agents

#178

Post by pinoy420 »

zOneLetter wrote: post #7

Maybe it's because I only code for my own tools, but I still don't understand the benefit of relying on someone/something else to write your code and then reading it, understand it, fixing it, etc. Although asking an LLM to extract and find the thing I'm looking for in an API Doc is super useful and time saving. To me, it's not even about how good these LLMs get in the future. I just don't like reading other people's…

[dead]

Re: How I program with agents

#179

Post by munificent »

marvstazar wrote: post #103
zOneLetter wrote: post #7

Maybe it's because I only code for my own tools, but I still don't understand the benefit of relying on someone/something else to write your code and then reading it, understand it, fixing it, etc. Although asking an LLM to extract and find the thing I'm looking for in an API Doc is super useful and time saving. To me, it's not even about how good these LLMs get in the future. I just don't like reading other people's…

As a senior developer you already spend a significant amount of time planning new feature implementations and reviewing other people's code (PRs). I find that this skill transitions quite nicely to working with coding agents.

I don't disagree but... wouldn't you rather be working with actual people?

Spending the whole day chatting with AI agents sounds like a worst-of-both-worlds scenarios. I have to bring all of my complex, subtle soft skills into play which are difficult and tiring to use, and in the end none of that went towards actually fostering real relationships with real people.

At the end of the day, are you gonna have a beer with your agents and tell them, "Wow, we really knocked it out of the park today?"

Spending all day talking to virtual coworkers is literally the loneliest experience I can imagine, infinitely worse than actually coding in solitude the entire day.

Re: How I program with agents

#180

Post by kasey_junk »

csallen wrote: post #156
dingnuts wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that humans learn. I got bit by this behavior of CombinedOutput once ten years ago, and no longer make this mistake.

This applies to AI, too, albeit in different ways: 1. You can iteratively improve the rules and prompts you give to the AI when coding. I do this a lot. My process is constantly improving, and the AI makes fewer mistakes as a result. 2. AI models get smarter. Just in the past few months, the LLMs I use to code are making significantly fewer mistakes than they were.

And you can build automatic checks that reinforce correct behavior for when the lessons haven’t been learned, by bot or human.
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