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How I program with agents

crawshaw.io

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Re: How I program with agents

#221

Post by resonious »

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…

It's an intentional (hopefully) tradeoff between development speed and deep understanding. By hiring someone or using an agent, you are getting increased speed for decreased understanding. Part of choosing whether or not to use an agent should include an analysis of how much benefit you get from a deep understanding of the subsystem you're currently working on. If it's something that can afford defects, you bet I'll get an agent to do a quick-n-dirty job.

Re: How I program with agents

#223

Post by owebmaster »

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…

what if we actually get dumber? There are multiple cases of people in the past that are way smarter than the current thought leaders and inventors. There are a higher % of smart people nowadays but are they smarter than Leonardo Da Vinci?

Re: How I program with agents

#224

Post by Aachen »

dahart wrote: post #48
quantumHazer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retina Display means nothing. Just because Apple pushed hard to make it common to everyone it doesn’t mean it’s a good technical name.

You’re right that it’s branding, but it also has meaning: a display resolution that (approximately) matches the resolution of the human retina, under typical viewing conditions. The fact that the term is easily understood by the lay public is what makes it a good name and smart branding. BTW the term ‘retinal display’ existed long before Apple used it, and refers to a display that projects directly onto the retina.

A screen that directly projects onto the retina sounds like a great reason to call it a retinal display. So then Apple hijacking the term to mean high DPI... how does that fit in?

There's not that many results about this before Apple's announcement in 2010, many of them reporting on science and not general public media: https://www.google.com/search?q=retinal+display&sca_esv=3689... Clearly not something anyone really used for an actual (not research grade) display, especially not in the meaning of high DPI

This isn't an especially easily understood term: that it means "good" would have been obvious no matter what this premium brand came up with. The fact that it's from Apple makes you assume it's good. (And the screens are good)

Re: How I program with agents

#225

Post by Aachen »

topek wrote: post #135
verifex wrote: post #124

Some of my favorite things to use AI for when coding (I swear I wrote this not AI!): - CSS: I don't like working with CSS on any website ever, and all of the kludges added on-top of it don't make it any more fun. AI makes it a little fun since it can remember all the CSS hacks so I don't have to spend an hour figuring out how to center some element on the page. Even if it doesn't get it right the first time, it still…

Interesting, I found AIs annoyingly incapable of writing good CSS. But I understand the appeal of using it for a task that you do not like to do yourself. For me it's writing ticket descriptions which it does way better than me.

Can you give an example?

Descriptions for things was the #1 example for me where LLMs are a hindrance, so I'm surprised to hear this. If the LLM (not working at this company / having a limited context window) gets your meaning from bullet points or keywords and writes nice prose, I could just read that shorthand (your input aka prompt) and not have to bother with the wordiness. But apparently you've managed to find a use for it?

Re: How I program with agents

#226

Post by munificent »

cwyers wrote: post #213
munificent wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

My employer can't go out and get me three actual people to work under me for $30 a month. EDIT: You can quibble on the exact rate of people's worth of work versus the cost of these tools, but look at what a single seat on Copilot or Cursor or Windsurf gets you, and you can see that if they are only barely more productive than you working without them, the economics are it's cheaper to "hire" virtual juniors than real…

That's fair but your experience at the job is also part of the compensation.

If my employer said, "Hey, you're going to keep making software, but also once a day, we have to slap you in the face." I might choose to keep the job, but they'd probably have to pay me more. They're making the work experience worse and that lowers my total compensation package.

Shepherding an army of artificial minions might be cheaper for the corporation, but it sounds like an absolutely miserable work experience so if they were offering me that job, they'd have to pay me more to take.

Re: How I program with agents

#227

Post by silverlake »

tauroid wrote: post #142
silverlake wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://kompose.io/

Here’s the real rebuttal to my overconfidence in LLMs. Thanks for the link!

Re: How I program with agents

#228

Post by majormajor »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #116
collingreen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your take and the metaphors are good at helping demonstrate by example. One caveat I wonder about is how this kind of constant context switching combines with the need to think deeply (and defensively with non humans). My gut says I'd struggle at also being the brain at the end of the day instead of just the director/conductor. I've actively paired with multiple people at once before because of a time crunch (…

> 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…

Being wired to work in groups is different than being wired to clean up the mess left by a bunch of LLM agents.

I do this "let it go do the crap while I think about what to do next" somewhat frequently. But it's mostly for easy crap around the edges (making tools to futz with logs or metrics, writing queries, moving things around). The failure rate for my actual day job code just is too high, even for non-rocket-science stuff. It's usually more frustrating to spend 5 minutes chatting with the agent and then fixing it's stuff than to just spend 5 minutes writing the code.

Cause the bot has all the worst bits of human interactions - like ambiguous incomplete understanding - without the reward of building a long-term social relationship. That latter thing is what I'm wired for.

Re: How I program with agents

#229

Post by majormajor »

davely wrote: post #181
gyomu wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you went from being able to handle at most 10 or so of these tasks you often get per week, to >500/week. Did you reap any workplace benefits from this insane boost in productivity?

My house has never been cleaner. I have time to catch up on chores that I normally do during the weekend. Dishes, laundry, walk the dog more. It seems silly but it’s opened up a lot of extra time for some of this stuff. Heck, I even play my guitar more, something I’ve neglected for years. Noodle around while I wait for Claude to finish something and then I review it. All in all, I dig this new world. But I also code…

That doesn't sound like a situation that will last. If management figures out you are using this extra time to do all your chores, they aren't gonna reward you. They might decide to get someone who would use the extra time to do more work...

Re: How I program with agents

#230

Post by majormajor »

divan wrote: post #15
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…

On one codebase I work with, there are often tasks that involve changing multiple files in a relatively predictable way. Like there is little creativity/challenge, but a lot of typing in multiple parts/files. Tasks like these used to take 3-4 hours complete before just because I had to physically open all these files, find right places to modify, type the code etc. With AI agent I just describe the task, and it does…

Amusingly, cursor took 5 minutes trying to figure out how to do what a simple global find/replace did for me in 30 seconds after I got tired of waiting for it's attempt just last night on a simple predictable lots-of-files change.

A 60x speedup is way more than I've seen even in its best case for things like that.

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