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Agentic Coding Recommendations

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Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#181

Post by dimal »

ajdidbdbsgs wrote: post #103
darkxanthos wrote: post #48

I stumbled into Agentic Coding in VS Code Nightlys with co-pilot using Claude Sonnet 4 and I've been silly productive. Even when half my day is meetings, you wouldn't be able to tell from my git history. My thinking now is removed from the gory details and is a step or two up. How can I validate the changes are working? Can I understand this code? How should it be structured so I can better understand it? Is there mo…

> Last night I had a file with 38 mypy errors Fixing type checker errors should be one the least time consuming things you do. This was previously consuming a lot of your time? A lot of the AI discourse would be more effective if we could all see the actual work one another is doing with it (similar to the cloudflare post).

I don’t know about fixing python types, but fixing typescript types can be very time consuming. A LOT of programming work is like this —- not solving anything interesting or difficult, but just time-consuming drudgery.

These tools have turned out to be great at this stuff. I don’t think I’ve turned over any interesting problems to an LLM and had it go well, but by using them to take care of drudgery, I have a lot more time to think about the interesting problems.

I would suggest that instead of asking people to post their work, try it out on whatever bullshit tasks you’ve been avoiding. And I specifically mean “tasks”. Stuff where the problem has already been solved a thousand times before.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#182

Post by dimal »

diggan wrote: post #60
fvdessen wrote: post #3

I find it excellent news that all the techniques that make agentic coding more efficient also make human coding more efficient. There was a worry that code would become big mud balls that only AI understand, but it looks like the opposite. Clear code is important for AI productivity, so it now matters even more, because the difference of productivity is immediately and objectively measurable. Before AIs what code was…

> There was a worry that code would become big mud balls That's always been a worry with programming (see basically all Rich Hickey talks), and is still a problem since people prefer "moving fast today" instead of "not having 10 tons of technical debt tomorrow" LLMs makes it even easier for people to spend the entire day producing boilerplate without stopping for a second to rethink why they are producing so much boi…

The type of person that would do that would have done the same thing without LLMs. LLMs don’t change anything except now they can just create their big ball of mud faster.

The pain of shitty code doesn’t go away. They can ship your crappy MVP faster, but technical debt doesn’t magically go away.

This is an awesome opportunity for those people to start learning how to do software design instead of just “programming”. People that don’t are going to be left behind.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#183

Post by haiku2077 »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #162
haiku2077 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context.Value's signature is Value(any) any - you have to use type conversion or reflection to determine the value's type at runtime, instead of a compile-time check.

But I have methods such as MustRateLimiterFromContext(ctx) which returns the right type :)

By crashing your program at runtime if any wrong type is added!

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#185

Post by ath3nd »

soulofmischief wrote: post #19
v5v3 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There was a worry that code would become big mud balls that only AI understand, but it looks like the opposite." For now...

As long as interfaces are well defined, comprehensive tests are written, memory is safely handled and time complexity is analyzable, who cares what the rest of the code looks like. I understand programming for the sake of programming, chasing purity and really digging into the creative aspects of coding. But I get that same kick out of writing perfect interfaces, knowing that the messier the code underneath is, the m…

> As long as interfaces are well defined, comprehensive tests are written, memory is safely handled and time complexity is analyzable, who cares what the rest of the code looks like.

Software engineers and anyone who'd get hired to fix the mess that the LLM created. Also, ironically, other LLMs would probably work better on...not messy code.

> But transformers are offering us a way to build faster, to create more, and to take on bigger complexity

Wow. You sound as if building faster or creating more is synonymous with quality or utility. Or as if LLMs allow us to take on a bigger level of complexity (this is where they notoriously crumble).

> we might enter a software golden age where the potential for creativity

I haven't heard of a single (good) software engineer whose creativity was stifled by their inability to code something. Is an LLM generating a whole book in Hemingway style considered creative, or a poem? Or a program/app?

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#186

Post by jacobr1 »

diggan wrote: post #129
jnwatson wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally less than an hour ago, I reviewed a bunch of LLM-generated boilerplate. I then told the agent to show me a plan to refactor it. I suggested some tweaks, and then it implemented the plan and then tested that it didn't break anything. It isn't much different than dealing with an extremely precocious junior engineer. Given how easy it is to refactor now, it certainly makes economic sense to delay it.

But I'm guessing you're doing those refactors because you know they're ultimately worth it, because you have experience programming since before LLMs? Like I know boilerplate and messy code sucks because I've had to work with it, without LLMs, and I know how much it sucks. I think you do too, but I think we know that, because we had to fight with it in the past.

LLMs start to bog down with it at a certain point too. For a couple of my side projects, I decided to let things rip and now worry about code structure at all. After a certain point some of the changes I wanted to make just started either failing work racking up large bills. It would try to make a change, run tests, realize it broke something somewhere else, try to fix that, cause another issue. Undo the original thing, fix the new issue, maybe try to refactor, partially, fail, revert that, decide to make the tests pass by removing the tests! and then keep some broken version of fix. With a few similar cycles of that on repeat as well.

Deliberately telling it how to rethink the structure, refactor first, then seperate out components fixed things.

IF LLMs stayed at the current level, I would expect llm-aided-coders to learn how to analyze and address situations like this. However, I do expect models to be better able to A) avoid these kinds of situations with better design up front or reflection when making changes and B) identify more systematic patterns and reason about the right way to structure things. Basically ambiently detecting "code smells."

You can already see improvements both from newer models and from prompt engineering coming from the agentic tools.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#187

Post by jacobr1 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #178
Leynos wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you skip these guardrails when working with a "Junior to Intermediate" developer?

No, but the goal of mentoring a Junior or Intermediate developer is that they eventually learn this stuff on their own. The value of helping another human grow is worth the tradeoff AI is a tool, not a human. I'm not about to invest in it the way I would a Junior developer. If the tool doesn't do the job, it's not a good tool. If a tool requires the same level of investment that a human does it's also not a good tool

These factors are now getting baked into the tools. Primarily via prompt engineering, and what might be called "agentic design," which is how much complexity you put into a single pass vs some hierarchical layering of agents and tools with distinct jobs.

I've been deobfuscating claude code to watch their prompts evolve as I use it and you an see the difference around how and when it chooses to re-analyze a codebase or how it will explicitly breakup work into steps. A lot of the implicit knowledge of software engineering is being added, _outside_ of the LLM training.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#188

Post by jacobr1 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #141
PeterStuer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A traditional digital stack's lifecycle is: 1. The previous gen has become bloated and complex because it widened it's scope to cover every possible miche scenario and got infiltrated by 'expert' language and framework specialists that went on an atrotecture binge. 2. As a result a new stack is born, much simpler, back to basics, than the poorly aged encumbant. It doesn't cover every niche, but it does a few newly po…

> It doesn't cover every niche, but it does a few newly popular things realy easy and well, and rises on the coattails of this new thing as the default envoronment for it How will it ever rise on the coattails of anything if it isn't in the AI training data so no one is ever incentivized to use it to begin with?

AI legible documentation. If you optimize for a "1-pager" doc you can add to the context of an LLM and that is all it needs to know to use your package or framework ... people will use it if has some kind non-technical advantage. deepwiki.com is sorta an attempt to automate doing something like this.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#189

Post by sensanaty »

reedf1 wrote: post #23

I have seen multiple articles pushing for GO as agentic language of choice; does anyone else feel like this is quite forced? I have tried agentic coding in several languages and I didn't have a particularly good or productive experience with GO.

All of this is forced, yes. There's probably a trillion dollars riding on this all not imploding, so we're getting it shoved everywhere, all the time, incessantly.

My own experience with "Agents" (and no, I am not a luddite) has been nothing short of comical in how terrible it's been. We try it every single day at our company. We've tried all the advice. All the common wisdom. They have never, not once, produced anything of any value. All the public showcases of these brilliant "agents" have also been nothing short of spectacular failures [1]. Yet despite all this, I keep seeing these type of posts, and pretty much always it's from someone with a vested interest of some kind when you dig deep down enough. All the managerial types pushing it, you look deep enough it's always because the board or investors or whatever other parasite has a vested interest.

I know one thing is for certain, what AI will give us is more and more fucking advertisements shoved into every facet of our lives, except now it sorta talks like a human!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152

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