231–240 of 341 posts
So far I only have one: Inflicting unreviewed code on collaborators, aka dumping a thousand line PR without even making sure it works first https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...
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Counter-point, developers that get used to not caring about function implementation, are going to culturally also not care as much about test implementation, making this proposed ideal impossible.
with LLMs, tests cost nearly nothing of effort but provide tremendous value.
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Thats interesting. While i do get mentally tired after a session of focused coding, i feel like i have accomplished something. Using AI for coding feels similar to spending hours doom scrolling reels. Less engaging but Im drained as hell at the end.
I'd argue you still have to stay engaged, if not more-so. Its a different type of engagement. Look at you: You're the CTO now.
Simon, if you're reading this, I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on how to effectively conduct code reviews in a world where "code is cheap". One of the biggest struggles I have on my team is coworkers straight up vibing parts of the code and not understanding or guiding the architecture of subsystems. Or at least, not writing code in a way that is meant to be understood by others. Then when I go through th…
Weirdly this article doesn't really talk about the main agentic pattern
- Plan (really important to start with a plan before code changes). iteratively build a plan to implement something. You can also have a colelctive review of the plan, make sure its what you want and there is guidance about how it should implement in terms of architecture (should also be pulling on pre existing context about your architecure /ccoding standards), what testing should be built. Make sure the agent reviews the plan, ask the agent to make suggestions and ask questions
- Execute. Make the agent (or multiple agents) execute on the plan
- Test / Fix cycle
- Code Review / Refactor
- Generate Test Guidance for QA
Then your deliverables are Code / Feature context documentation / Test Guidance + evolving your global/project context
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I’m not OP but every time I post a comment with this sentiment I get told “the latest models are what you need”. If every 3 months you are saying “it’s ready as long as you use the latest model”, then it wasn’t ready 3 months ago and it’s not likely to be ready now. To answer your question, I’ve tried both Claude code and Antigravity in the last 2 weeks and I’m still finding them struggling. AG with Gemini regularly…
I thought this too and then I discovered plan mode. If you just prompt agent mode it will be terrible, but coming up with a plan first has really made a big difference and I rarely write code at all now
Simon, if you're reading this, I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on how to effectively conduct code reviews in a world where "code is cheap". One of the biggest struggles I have on my team is coworkers straight up vibing parts of the code and not understanding or guiding the architecture of subsystems. Or at least, not writing code in a way that is meant to be understood by others. Then when I go through th…
Agent based code reviews is what you want. But you have to do set it up with really good context about what is wanted. You then review the reviews, keep improving the context it is working with. Make sure it's put into everyone's global context they work with as well. Weirdly this article doesn't really talk about the main agentic pattern - Plan (really important to start with a plan before code changes). iteratively…
Yea, a big part of my planning has included what verification steps will be necessary along the way or at the end. No plan gets executed without that and I often ask for specific focus on this aspect in plan mode.
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I predict the main democratization change is going to be how easy people can make plumbing that doesn't require--or at least not obviously require--such specificity or mental-modeling of the business domain. For example, "Generate me some repeatable code to ask system X for data about Y, pull out value Z, and submit it to system W."
What happens when value Z is not >= X? What happens when value Z doesn't exist, but values J and K do? What should be done when... I hear what you're saying, but I think it's going to be entertaining watching people go "I guess this is why we paid Bob all of that money all those years".
But it stands to reason that would be a huge shift if a system accessible to non-technical users could mostly handle those edge cases, even when "handle" means failing silently without taking the entire thing down, or simply raising them for human intervention via Slack message or email or a dashboard or something.
And Bob's still going to get paid a lot of money he'll just be doing stuff that's more useful than figuring out how negative numbers should be parsed in the ETL pipeline.
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My experience is that the first iteration output from a single agent is not what I want to be on the hook for. What squares it for me with "not writing code anymore" is the iterative process to improve outputs: 1) Having review loops between agents (spawn separate "reviewer" agents) and clear tests / eval criteria improved results quite a bit for me. 2) Reviewing manually and giving instructions for improvements is n…
Is that… actually faster than just doing it yourself, tho? Like, “I could write the right thing, or I could have this robot write the wrong thing and then nag it til it corrects itself” seems to suggest a fairly obvious choice. I’ve yet to see these things do well on anything but trivial boilerplate.
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Agent based code reviews is what you want. But you have to do set it up with really good context about what is wanted. You then review the reviews, keep improving the context it is working with. Make sure it's put into everyone's global context they work with as well. Weirdly this article doesn't really talk about the main agentic pattern - Plan (really important to start with a plan before code changes). iteratively…
> what testing should be built Yea, a big part of my planning has included what verification steps will be necessary along the way or at the end. No plan gets executed without that and I often ask for specific focus on this aspect in plan mode.
Simon, if you're reading this, I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on how to effectively conduct code reviews in a world where "code is cheap". One of the biggest struggles I have on my team is coworkers straight up vibing parts of the code and not understanding or guiding the architecture of subsystems. Or at least, not writing code in a way that is meant to be understood by others. Then when I go through th…
- A lot more linting rules than ever before, also custom rule sets that do more org and project level validations.
- Harder types enforcement in type optional languages , Stronger and deeper typing in all of them .
- beyond unit tests - test quality coverage tooling like mutation testing(stryker) and property based testing (quickcheck) if you can go that precise
- much more dx scripts and build harnesses that are specific to org and repo practices that usually junior/new devs learn over time
- On dynamic side , per pull requests environments with e2e tests that agents can validate against and iterate when things don’t work.
- documentation generation and skill curation. After doing a batch of pull requests reviews I will spend time in seeing where the gaps are in repo skills and agents.
All this becomes pre-commit heavy, and laptops cannot keep up in monorepos, so we ended up doing more remote containers on beefy machines and investing and also task caching (nx/turborepo have this )
Reviews (agentic or human) have their uses , but doing this with reviews is just high latency, inefficient and also tends to miss things and we become the bottleneck.
Earlier the coder(human or agent) gets repeatable consistent feedback it is better