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Eight more months of agents

crawshaw.io

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Re: Eight more months of agents

#161

Post by kjksf »

kakacik wrote: post #134
symfrog wrote: post #120

Any sufficiently complicated LLM generated program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of an open source project.

We had an effort recently where one much more experienced dev from our company ran Claude on our oldish codebase for one system, with the goal of transforming it into newer structure, newer libraries etc. while preserving various built in functionalities. Not the first time this guy did such a thing and he is supposed to be an expert. I took a look at the result and its maybe half of stuff missing completely, rest is…

Not to take away from your experience but to offer a counterpoint.

I used claude code to port rust pdb parsing library to typescript.

My SumatraPDF is a large C++ app and I wanted visibility into where does the size of functions / data go, layout of classes. So I wanted to build a tool to dump info out of a PDB. But I have been diagnosed with extreme case of Rustophobiatis so I just can't touch rust code. Hence, the port to typescript.

With my assistance it did the work in an afternoon and did it well. The code worked. I ran it against large PDB from SumatraPDF and it matched the output of other tools.

In a way porting from one language to another is extreme case of refactoring and Claude did it very well.

I think that in general (your experience notwithstanding) Claude Caude is excellent at refactorings.

Here are 3 refactorings from SumatraPDF where I asked claude code to simplify code written by a human:

https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a472d3... https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/5624aa... https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a40bc9...

I hope you agree the code written by Claude is better than the code written by a human.

Granted, those are small changes but I think it generalizes into bigger changes. I have few refactorings in mind I wanted to do for a long time and maybe with Claude they will finally be feasible (they were not feasible before only because I don't have infinite amount of time to do everything I want to do).

Re: Eight more months of agents

#162

Post by piokoch »

"In 2026, I don't use an IDE any more."

Just a question? What IDE feature is obsolete now? Ability to navigate the code? Integration with database, Docker, JIRA, Github (like having PR comments available, listed, etc), Git? Working with remote files? Building the project?

Yes, I can ask copilot to build my project and verify tests results, but it will eat a lot of tokens and added value is almost none.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#163

Post by shinycode »

arrrg wrote: post #151
entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

To me the hard problem isn’t building things, it’s knowing what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that makes something possible that wasn’t possible before). I don’t see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I also don’t see AI finding novel approaches to anything. Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewh…

I agree. It’s really easier to build low-impact tools for personal use. I managed to produce tools I would never have had time to build and I use them everyday. But I will never sell them because it’s tailored to my needs and it makes no sense to open source anything nowadays. For work it’s different, product teams still need to decide what to build and what is helpful to the clients. Our bugs are not self-fixed by AI yet. I think Anthropic saying 100% of their code is AI generated is a marketing stunt. They have all reasons to say that to sell their tool that generates code. It sends a strong signal to the industry that if they can do it, it could be easier for smaller companies. We are not there yet from a client perspective asking a feature and the new feature is shipped 2 days later in prod without human interactions

Re: Eight more months of agents

#164

Post by Cthulhu_ »

entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

I'm sure there's plenty of new software being released and built by agents, but the same problem as handcrafted software remains - finding an audience. The easier and quicker it is to build software, or the more developers build software, the more stuff is thrown at a wall to see what sticks, but I don't think there's more capacity for sticktivity, if my analogy hasn't broken down by now.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#165

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bananaflag wrote: post #139
entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

I think, if there were to be a noticeable increase in software quantity due to agentic coding, we should test it by looking into indie games.

According to SteamDB (and Reddit), 2024 and 2025 both saw about 19.000 games released on Steam - there's a big jump between '23 and '24 of about 5000 games, but oddly it plateaued then.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1pl7kg1/over_1900...

Re: Eight more months of agents

#166

Post by pzo »

arrrg wrote: post #151
entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

To me the hard problem isn’t building things, it’s knowing what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that makes something possible that wasn’t possible before). I don’t see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I also don’t see AI finding novel approaches to anything. Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewh…

> To me the hard problem isn’t building things, it’s knowing what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that makes something possible that wasn’t possible before).

The problem with this that after doing this hard work someone can just copy easily your hard work and UI/UX taste. I think distribution will be very important in the future.

We might end up that in future that you have already in social media where influencers copy someones post/video and not giving credits to original author.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#167

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

You aren't notcing it?

Small and mid sized companies are getting custom software now.

Small software is able to be packed with extra features instead of bare minimum.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#168

Post by Havoc »

Disagree with the point about anything less than opus being harmful to learning.

Much of my learning still requires experimentation - including lots of token volume so hitting limits is a problem.

And secondly I’m looking for workflows that build the thing without needing to be at the absolute edge of the LLM capability. Thats where fragility and unpredictability live. Where a new model with slightly different personality is released and it breaks everything. I’d rather have flow that is simple and idiot proof that doesn’t fall apart at the first sign of non-bleeding edge tokens. That means skipping the gains from something opus could one shot ofc but that’s acceptable to me

Re: Eight more months of agents

#169

Post by gbuk2013 »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #126
entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

Org processes have not changed. Lots of the devs I know are enjoying the speedup on mundane work, consuming it as a temporary lifestyle surplus until everything else catches up. You can't saw faster than the wood arrives. Also the layout of the whole job site is now wrong and the council approvals were the actual bottleneck to how many houses could be built in the first place... :/

Basically this. My last several tickets were HITL coding with AI for several hours and then waiting 1-2 days while the code worked its way through PR and CI/CD process.

Coding speed was never really a bottleneck anywhere I have worked - it’s all the processes around it that take the most time and AI doesn’t help that much there.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#170

Post by thegrim000 »

"Eight more months of Bitcoin. It's usage continues to dramatically expand. The amount of transactions is increasing exponentially. Soon, fiat currencies will collapse, all replaced by Bitcoin transactions. If you haven't converted your assets over to Bitcoin you're going to be left behind and lose it all. I can't even understand people that don't see the obvious technical superiority of Bitcoin, such people are going to go through rough times."
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