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Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem
11–20 of 151 posts
Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem
#12meh piece, don't feel like I learned anything from it. Mainly words around old stats in a rapidly evolving field, and then trying to pitch their product tl;dr content marketing There is this super interesting post in new about agent swarms and how the field is evolving towards formal verification like airlines, or how there are ideas we can draw on. Any, imo it should be on the front over this piece "Why AI Swarms Ca…
> meh piece, don't feel like I learned anything from it.
That's fine. I found the leading stats interesting. If coding assistants slowed down experienced developers while creating a false sense of development speed then that should be thought-provoking. Also, nearly half of code churned by coding assistants having security issues. That he's tough.
Perhaps it's just me, but that's in line with my personal experience, and I rarely see those points being raised.
> There is this super interesting post in new about agent swarms and how (...)
That's fine. Feel free to submit the link. I find it far more interesting to discuss the post-rose tinted glasses view of coding agents. I don't think it makes any sense at all to laud promises of formal verification when the same technology right now is unable to introduce security vulnerabilities.
Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem
#13I think AI will fail in any organisation where the business process problems are sometimes discuvered during engineering. I use AI quite a lot, I recently had Claude upgrade one of our old services from hubspot api v1 to v3 without basically any human interaction beyond the code review. I had to ask it for two changes I think, but over all I barely got out of my regular work to get it done. I did know exactly what to ask of it because the IT business partners who had discovered the flaw had basically written the tasks already. Anyway. AI worked well there.
Where AI fails us is when we build new software to improve the business related to solar energy production and sale. It fails us because the tasks are never really well defined. Or even if they are, sometimes developers or engineers come up with a better way to do the business process than what was planned for. AI can write the code, but it doesn't refuse to write the code without first being told why it wouldn't be a better idea to do X first. If we only did code-reviews then we would miss that step.
In a perfect organisation your BPM people would do this. In the world I live in there are virtually no BPM people, and those who know the processes are too busy to really deal with improving them. Hell... sometimes their processes are changed and they don't realize until their results are measurably better than they used to be. So I think it depends a lot on the situation. If you've got people breaking up processes, improving them and then decribing each little bit in decent detail. Then I think AI will work fine, otherwise it's probably not the best place to go full vibe.
Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem
#14For me, AI is an enabler for things you can't do otherwise (or that would take many weeks of learning). But you still need to know how to do things properly in general, otherwise the results are bad.
E.g. I'm a software architect and developer for many years. So I know already how to build software but I'm not familiar with every language or framework. AI enabled me to write other kind of software I never learned or had time for. E.g. I recently re-implemented an android widget that has not been updated for a decade by it's original author. Or I fixed a bug in a linux scanner driver. None of these I could have done properly (within an acceptable time frame) without AI. But also none of there I could have done properly without my knowledge and experience, even with AI.
Same for daily tasks at work. AI makes me faster here, but also makes me doing more. Implement tests for all edge cases? Sure, always, I saved the time before. More code reviews. More documentation. Better quality in the same (always limited) time.
Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem
#15First you must accept that engineering elegance != market value. Only certain applications and business models need the crème de le crème of engineers. LLM has been hollowing out the mid and lower end of engineering. But has not eroded highest end. Otherwise all the LLM companies wouldn’t pay for talent, they’d just use their own LLM.
I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value. You won’t see it right away which is probably where this sentiment is coming from, but it will absolutely catch up to you. Elegant code isn’t just for looks. It’s code that can still adapt weeks, months, years after it has shipped and created “business value”.
> I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value.
That's a rather short-sighted opinion. Ask yourself how "inelegant code" find it's way into a codebase, even with working code review processes.
The answer more often than not is what's typically referred to as tech debt driven development. Meaning, sometimes a hacky solution with glaring failure modes left unaddressed is all it takes to deliver a major feature in a short development cycle. Once the feature is out, it becomes less pressing to pay off that tech debt because the risk was already assumed and the business value was already created.
Later you stumble upon a weird bug in your hacky solution. Is that bug negative business value?
Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem
#16meh piece, don't feel like I learned anything from it. Mainly words around old stats in a rapidly evolving field, and then trying to pitch their product tl;dr content marketing There is this super interesting post in new about agent swarms and how the field is evolving towards formal verification like airlines, or how there are ideas we can draw on. Any, imo it should be on the front over this piece "Why AI Swarms Ca…
> meh piece, don't feel like I learned anything from it. That's fine. I found the leading stats interesting. If coding assistants slowed down experienced developers while creating a false sense of development speed then that should be thought-provoking. Also, nearly half of code churned by coding assistants having security issues. That he's tough. Perhaps it's just me, but that's in line with my personal experience,…
> found the leading stats interesting
They are from before the current generation of models and agent tools, they are almost certainly out of date and now different and will continue to evolve
We're still learning to crawl, haven't gotten to walking yet
Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem
#17meh piece, don't feel like I learned anything from it. Mainly words around old stats in a rapidly evolving field, and then trying to pitch their product tl;dr content marketing There is this super interesting post in new about agent swarms and how the field is evolving towards formal verification like airlines, or how there are ideas we can draw on. Any, imo it should be on the front over this piece "Why AI Swarms Ca…
> meh piece, don't feel like I learned anything from it. That's fine. I found the leading stats interesting. If coding assistants slowed down experienced developers while creating a false sense of development speed then that should be thought-provoking. Also, nearly half of code churned by coding assistants having security issues. That he's tough. Perhaps it's just me, but that's in line with my personal experience,…
> Feel free to submit the link
I did, or someone else did, it's the link in the post you replied to
Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem
#18I think AI will fail in any organisation where the business process problems are sometimes discuvered during engineering. I use AI quite a lot, I recently had Claude upgrade one of our old services from hubspot api v1 to v3 without basically any human interaction beyond the code review. I had to ask it for two changes I think, but over all I barely got out of my regular work to get it done. I did know exactly what to…
> business process problems are sometimes discovered (sic.) during engineering
This deserves a blog post all on its own. OP you should write one and submit it. It's a good counterweight to all the AI optimistic/pessimistic extremism.
Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value. You won’t see it right away which is probably where this sentiment is coming from, but it will absolutely catch up to you. Elegant code isn’t just for looks. It’s code that can still adapt weeks, months, years after it has shipped and created “business value”.
> I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value. That's a rather short-sighted opinion. Ask yourself how "inelegant code" find it's way into a codebase, even with working code review processes. The answer more often than not is what's typically referred to as tech debt driven development. Meaning, sometimes a ha…
Of course a bug is negative business value. Perhaps the benefit of shipping faster was worth the cost of introducing bugs, but that doesn't make it not a cost.
Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem
#20First you must accept that engineering elegance != market value. Only certain applications and business models need the crème de le crème of engineers. LLM has been hollowing out the mid and lower end of engineering. But has not eroded highest end. Otherwise all the LLM companies wouldn’t pay for talent, they’d just use their own LLM.
LLM has been hollowing out the mid and lower end of engineering. But has not eroded highest end. Otherwise all the LLM companies wouldn’t pay for talent, they’d just use their own LLM.
OpenAI has said they're slowing down hiring drastically because their models are making them that much more productive. Codex itself is being built by Codex. Same with Claude Code.