131–140 of 478 posts
I use Augment with Claud Opus 4.5 every day at my job. I barely ever write code by hand anymore. I don't blindly accept the code that it writes, I iterate with it. We review code at my work. I have absolutely found a lot of benefit from my tools. I've implemented several medium-scale projects that I anticipate would have taken 1-2 weeks manually, and took a day or so using agentic tools. A few very concrete advantage…
You fundamentally misunderstand AI assisted coding if you think it does the work for you, or that it gets it right, or that it can be trusted to complete a job. It is an assistant not a team mate. If you think that getting it wrong, or bugs, or misunderstandings, or lost code, or misdirections, are AI "failing", then yes you will fail to understand or see the value. The point is that a good AI assisted developer stee…
A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year. Two days later, after people freaked out, context was added. The team built multiple versions in that year, each had its trade offs. All that context was given to the AI and it was able to produce a “toy” version. I can only assume it had similar trade offs. https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/200765974…
Claude Cowork was apparently completely written by Claude Code. So this appears to yet again be a skill issue.
https://www.promptarmor.com/resources/claude-cowork-exfiltra...
> Claude Cowork Exfiltrates files
That explains it
A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year. Two days later, after people freaked out, context was added. The team built multiple versions in that year, each had its trade offs. All that context was given to the AI and it was able to produce a “toy” version. I can only assume it had similar trade offs. https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/200765974…
While ignoring the many, many cases of well-known and talented developers who give more context and say that agentic coding does give them a significant speedup (like Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison).
You fundamentally misunderstand AI assisted coding if you think it does the work for you, or that it gets it right, or that it can be trusted to complete a job. It is an assistant not a team mate. If you think that getting it wrong, or bugs, or misunderstandings, or lost code, or misdirections, are AI "failing", then yes you will fail to understand or see the value. The point is that a good AI assisted developer stee…
[flagged]
I’m not exactly a typical SWE at the moment. The role I’m in is a lot of meeting with customers, understand their issues, and whip up demos to show how they might apply my company’s products to their problem.
So I’m not writing production code, but I am writing code that I want to to be maintainable and changeable so I can stash a demo for a year and then spin it up quickly when someone wants to see if or update/adapt it as products/problems change. Most of my career has been spent writing aircraft SW so I am heavily biased toward code quality and assurance. The demos I am building are not trivial or common in the training data. They’re highly domain specific and pretty niche, performance is very important, and usually span low level systems code all the way up to a decent looking gui. As a made up example, it wouldn’t be unusual for me to have a project to write a medical imaging pipeline from scratch that employs modern techniques from recent papers, etc.
Up until very recently, I only thought coding agents were useful for basic crud apps, etc. I said the same things a lot of people on this thread are saying, eg. people on twitter are all hype, their experience doesn’t match mine, they must be working on easy problems or be really bad at writing code
I recently decided to give into the hype and really try to use the tooling and… it’s kind of blown my mind.
Cursor + opus 4.5 high are my main tools and their ability to one shot major changes across many files and hundreds of lines of code, encompassing low level systems stuff, GOU accelerated stuff, networking, etc.
It’s seriously altering my perception of what software engineering is and will be and frankly I’m still kind of recoiling from it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe it fundamentally eliminates the need for SWEs, it still takes a lot of work on my part to come up with a spec (though I do have it help me with that part), correct things that I don’t like in its planning or catch it doing the wrong thing in real time in and re direct it. And it will make strange choices that I need to correct on the back end sometimes. But it has legitimately allowed me to build 10x faster than I probably could on my own.
Maybe the most important thing about it is what it enables you to build that would have been not worth the trouble before, Stuff like wrapping tools in really nice flexible TUIs, creating visualizations/dashboards/benchmark, slightly altering how an application works to cover a use case you hadn’t thought of before, wrapping an interface so it’s easy to swap libs/APIs later, etc.
If you are still skeptical, I would highly encourage you to immerse yourself in the SOTS tools right now and just give in to the hype for a bit, because I do think we’re rapidly going to reach a point here where if you aren’t using these tools you won’t be employable.
Learning how to drive the models is a legit skill - and I don't mean "prompt engineering". There are absolutely techniques that help and because things are moving fast there is little established practice to draw from. But it's also been interesting seeing experienced coders struggle - I've found my time as a manager has been more help to me than my time as a coder. How to keep people on task and focused etc is very…
+1 for generating plans and then clearing context. I typically have a skill and an agent. I use the skill to generate an initial plan for an atomic unit of work, clear context and then use the agent to review said plan. Finally clear context and use the skill to implement the plan phase by phase, ensuring to review each phase for consistency with the next phase and the overall plan. I've had moderate success with thi…
If you keep the notes around in repo, you can instruct future plan writers to review implementation notes from relevant plans to keep continuity.
The only approach I've tried that seems to work reasonably well, and consistently, was the following: Make a commit. Give Claude a task that's not particularly open ended, the closer to pure "monkey work" boilerplate nonsense the task is, the better (which is also the sort of code I don't want do deal with myself). Preferably it should be something that only touches a file or two in the codebase unless it is a trivia…
My personal use is very much one function at a time. I know what I need something to do, so I get it to write the function which I then piece together.
It can even come back with alternatives I may not have considered.
I might give it some context, but I'm mainly offloading a bunch of typing. I usually debug and fix it's code myself rather than trying to get it to do better.