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Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#121

Post by bevr1337 »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #81
asciimov wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are those without that kind of scratch supposed to keep up with those that do?

If you lack "that kind of scratch", you are at the learning stage for software development, not the keeping up stage. Either that or horribly underpaid.

I recently had a coworker tell me he liked his last workplace because "we all spoke the same language." It was incredible how much he revealed about himself with what he thought was a simple fact about engineer culture. Your comment reminds me of that exchange.

- Employers, not employees, should provide workplace equipment or compensation for equipment. Don't buy bits for the shop, nails for the foreman, or Cursor for the tech lead.

- the workplace is not a meritocracy. People are not defined by their wealth.

- If $1,000 does not represent an appreciable amount of someone's assets, they are doing well in life. Approximately half of US citizens cannot afford rent if they lose a paycheck.

- Sometimes the money needs to go somewhere else. Got kids? Sick and in the hospital? Loan sharks? A pool full of sharks and they need a lot of food?

- Folks can have different priorities and it's as simple as that

We're (my employer) still unsure if new dev tooling is improving productivity. If we find out it was unhelpful, I'll be very glad I didn't lose my own money.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#122

Post by afarviral »

This has been my experience as well, but there are plenty of assertions here that are not always true, e.g. "AI coding tools are sophisticated enough (they are not) to fix issues in my projects" … but how do you know this if you are not constantly checking whether the tooling has improved? I think for a certain level of issue AI can tackle it and improve things, but there's only a subset of the available models and of a multitude of workflows that will work well, but unfortunately we are drowning in many that are mediocre at best and many like me give up before finding the winning combination.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#123

Post by smaudet »

tptacek wrote: post #106

I'm fine with anybody saying AI agents don't work for their work-style and am not looking to rebut this piece, but I'm going to take this opportunity to call something out. The author writes "reviewing code is actually harder than most people think. It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself". That sounds within an SD of true for me, to…

I guess my challenge is that "if it was a rote recitation of an idiomatic go function", was it worth writing?

There is a certain, style, lets say, of programming, that encourages highly non re-usable code that is both at once boring and tedious, and impossible to maintain and thus not especially worthwhile.

The "rote code" could probably have been expressed, succinctly, in terms that border on "plain text", but with more rigueur de jour, with less overpriced, wasteful, potentially dangerous models in-between.

And yes, machines like the eBPF verifier must follow strict rules to cut out the chaff, of which there is quite a lot, but it neither follows that we should write everything in eBPF, nor does it follow that because something can throw out the proverbial "garbage", that makes it a good model to follow...

Put another way, if it was that rote, you likely didn't need nor benefit from the AI to begin with, a couple well tested library calls probably sufficed.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#124

Post by bilalq »

I've found "agents" to be an utter disappointment in their current state. You can never trust what they've done and need to spend so much time verifying their solution that you may as well have just done it yourself in the first place.

However, AI code reviewers have been really impressive. We run three separate AI reviewers right now and are considering adding more. One of these reviewers is kind of noisy, so we may drop it, but the others have been great. Sure, they have false positives sometimes and they don't catch everything. But they do catch real issues and prevent customer impact.

The Copilot style inline suggestions are also decent. You can't rely on it for things you don't know about, but it's great at predicting what you were going to type anyway.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#125

Post by 9rx »

susshshshah wrote: post #100
sagarpatil wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always use Claude Code to debug issues, there’s no point in trying to do this yourself when AI can fix it in minutes (easy to verify if you write tests first) o3 with new search can do things in 5 mins that will take me at least 30 mins if I’m very efficient. Say what you want but the time savings is real.

How do you know what tests to write if you don’t understand the code?

Same way you normally would? Tests are concerned with behaviour. The code that implements the behaviour is immaterial.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#126

Post by monero-xmr »

tptacek wrote: post #106

I'm fine with anybody saying AI agents don't work for their work-style and am not looking to rebut this piece, but I'm going to take this opportunity to call something out. The author writes "reviewing code is actually harder than most people think. It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself". That sounds within an SD of true for me, to…

I mostly just approve PRs because I trust my engineers. I have developed a 6th sense for thousand-line PRs and knowing which 100-300 lines need careful study.

Yes I have been burned. But 99% of the time, with proper test coverage it is not an issue, and the time (money) savings have been enormous.

"Ship it!" - me

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#127

Post by andrewstuart »

He’s saying it’s not faster because he needs to impose his human analysis on it which is slow.

That’s fine, but it’s an arbitrary constraint he chooses, and it’s wrong to say AI is not faster. It is. He just won’t let it be faster.

Some won’t like to hear this, but no-one reviews the machine code that a compiler outputs. That’s the future, like it or not.

You can’t say compilers are slow because I add on the time I take to Analyse the machine code. That’s you being slow.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#128

Post by 112233 »

tptacek wrote: post #106

I'm fine with anybody saying AI agents don't work for their work-style and am not looking to rebut this piece, but I'm going to take this opportunity to call something out. The author writes "reviewing code is actually harder than most people think. It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself". That sounds within an SD of true for me, to…

This is radical and healthy way to do it. Obviously wrong — reject. Obviously right — accept. In any other case — also reject, as non-obvious.

I guess it is far removed from the advertized use case. Also, I feel one would be better off having auto-complete powered by LLM in this case.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#129

Post by tptacek »

112233 wrote: post #128
tptacek wrote: post #106

I'm fine with anybody saying AI agents don't work for their work-style and am not looking to rebut this piece, but I'm going to take this opportunity to call something out. The author writes "reviewing code is actually harder than most people think. It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself". That sounds within an SD of true for me, to…

This is radical and healthy way to do it. Obviously wrong — reject. Obviously right — accept. In any other case — also reject, as non-obvious. I guess it is far removed from the advertized use case. Also, I feel one would be better off having auto-complete powered by LLM in this case.

I don't find this to be the case. I've used (and hate) autocomplete-style LLM code generation. But I can feed 10 different tasks to Codex in the morning and come back and pick out the 3-4 I think might be worth pursuing, and just re-prompt the 7 I kill. That's nothing like interactive autocomplete, and drastically faster than than I could work without LLM assistance.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#130

Post by serpix »

notnullorvoid wrote: post #120
waprin wrote: post #19

To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing, so it's not surprising that some people are better at one than the other. The author is basically saying that he's much better at coding than AI coding. But it's important to realize that AI coding is itself a skill that you can develop. It's not just , pick the best tool and let it go. Managing prompts and managing context has a much higher ski…

Is it a skill worth learning though? How much does the output quality improve? How transferable is it across models and tools of today, and of the future? From what I see of AI programming tools today, I highly doubt the skills developed are going to transfer to tools we'll see even a year from now.

Regarding using AI tools for programming it is not a one-for-all choice. You can pick a grunt work task such as "Tag every such and such terraform resource with a uuid" and let it do just that. Nothing to do with quality but everything to do with a simple task and not having to bother with the tedium.
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