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Scaling long-running autonomous coding

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Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#51

Post by nl »

jphoward wrote: post #2

The browser it built, obviously the context window of the entire project is huge. They mention loads of parallel agents in the blog post, so I guess each agent is given a module to work on, and some tests? And then a 'manager' agent plugs this in without reading the code? Otherwise I can't see how, even with ChatGPT 5.2/Gemini 3, you could do this otherwise? In retrospect it seems an obvious approach and akin to how…

Generally they only load a bit of the project into the context at a time. Grep works really well for working out what.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#52

Post by tired_and_awake »

icedchai wrote: post #32
tired_and_awake wrote: post #28

The moment all code is interacted with through agents I cease to care about code quality. The only thing that matters is the quality of the product, cost of maintenance etc. exactly the thing we measure software development orgs against. It could be handy to have these projects deployed to demonstrate their utility and efficacy? Looking at PRs of agents feels a wrong headed, like who cares if agents code is hard to r…

This is how we wound up with non-technical "engineering managers." Looks good to me.

I think this misses the point, see the other comments. Fully scaled agentic coding replaces managers too :) cause for celebration all around

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#53

Post by nl »

Remember when 3D printers meant the death of factories? Everyone would just print what they wanted at home.

I'm very bullish on LLMs building software, but this doesn't mean the death of software products anymore than 3D printers meant the death of factories.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#54

Post by luhego »

> We initially built an integrator role for quality control and conflict resolution, but found it created more bottlenecks than it solved

Of course it creates bottlenecks, since code quality takes time and people don’t get it right on the first try when the changes are complex. I could also be faster if I pushed directly to prod!

Don’t get me wrong. I use these tools, and I can see the productivity gains. But I also believe the only way to achieve the results they show is to sacrifice quality, because no software engineer can review the changes at the same speed the agent generates code. They may solve that problem, or maybe the industry will change so only output and LOC matter, but until then I will keep cursing the agent until I get the result I want.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#56

Post by mdswanson »

Over the past year or so, I've built my own system of agents that behaves almost exactly like this. I can describe what I'd like built before I go to bed and have a fantastic foundation in place by the next day. For simpler projects, they'll be complete. Because of the reviews, the code continually improves until the agents are satisfied. I'm impressed every time.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#57

Post by suriya-ganesh »

jaggederest wrote: post #43
Snuggly73 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

error: could not compile `fastrender` (lib) due to 34 previous errors; 94 warnings emitted I guess probably at some point, something compiled, but cba to try to find that commit. I guess they should've left it in a better state before doing that blog post.

I find it very interesting the degree to which coding agents completely ignore warnings. When I program I generally target warning-free code, and even with significant effort in prompting, I haven't found a model that treats warnings as errors, and they almost all love the "ignore this warning" pragmas or comments over actually fixing them.

unfortunately this is not the most common practice. I've worked on rust codebases with 10K+ warning. and rust was supposed to help you.

It is also close to impossible run any node ecosystem without getting a wall of warnings.

You are an extreme outlier for putting in the work to fix all warnings

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#58

Post by ianbutler »

jaggederest wrote: post #43
Snuggly73 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

error: could not compile `fastrender` (lib) due to 34 previous errors; 94 warnings emitted I guess probably at some point, something compiled, but cba to try to find that commit. I guess they should've left it in a better state before doing that blog post.

I find it very interesting the degree to which coding agents completely ignore warnings. When I program I generally target warning-free code, and even with significant effort in prompting, I haven't found a model that treats warnings as errors, and they almost all love the "ignore this warning" pragmas or comments over actually fixing them.

Yeah I've had problems with this recently. "Oh those are just warnings." Yes but leaving them will make this codebase shit in short time.

I do use AI heavily so I resorted to actually turning on warnings as errors in the rust codebases I work in.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#59

Post by conception »

jaggederest wrote: post #43
Snuggly73 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

error: could not compile `fastrender` (lib) due to 34 previous errors; 94 warnings emitted I guess probably at some point, something compiled, but cba to try to find that commit. I guess they should've left it in a better state before doing that blog post.

I find it very interesting the degree to which coding agents completely ignore warnings. When I program I generally target warning-free code, and even with significant effort in prompting, I haven't found a model that treats warnings as errors, and they almost all love the "ignore this warning" pragmas or comments over actually fixing them.

You can use hooks to keep them from being able to do this btw

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#60

Post by jaggederest »

suriya-ganesh wrote: post #57
jaggederest wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very interesting the degree to which coding agents completely ignore warnings. When I program I generally target warning-free code, and even with significant effort in prompting, I haven't found a model that treats warnings as errors, and they almost all love the "ignore this warning" pragmas or comments over actually fixing them.

unfortunately this is not the most common practice. I've worked on rust codebases with 10K+ warning. and rust was supposed to help you. It is also close to impossible run any node ecosystem without getting a wall of warnings. You are an extreme outlier for putting in the work to fix all warnings

`cargo clippy` is also very happy with my code. I agree and I think it's kind of a tragedy, I think for production work warnings are very important. Certainly, even if you have a large number of warnings and `clippy` issues, that number ideally should go down over time, rather than up.
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