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Agentic Coding Is a Trap

larsfaye.com

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Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#31

Post by deadbabe »

turtleyacht wrote: post #2

Would like to see a study of brain scans during flow, manual programming, compared to code review. If the conclusion is different parts of the brain are activated, then orchestration is a separate activity entirely. Reading code is not the same as writing code. However, the code review study needs to compare between surface scanning and reviewing long enough to get over a theoretical slough of perspective: when you a…

It is definitely not the same parts of a brain.

Code review alone is kind of like being able to understand a foreign language enough to read it, but not really understand it in flowing conversation or being able to speak it, much less construct a complex piece of literature.

Retention also suffers, as you will quickly forget what you just reviewed. What is the last PR you remember?

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#34

Post by 2ndorderthought »

logickkk1 wrote: post #23

"Don't vibe code" but here's a deadline that's impossible without it. classic

Software engineers and their leadership have been pushing back on terrible product managers for decades. AI isn't the reason to stop our time honored tradition. If anything we can write the emails faster now

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#35

Post by 2ndorderthought »

brightball wrote: post #32
2ndorderthought wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comment deleted because it was backwards

But you’d have that coding it yourself…

Actually ignore my comment I misunderstood the premise. I meant not vibe coding is the way to save time with production issues. Not the other way around!

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#37

Post by hgyyy »

turtleyacht wrote: post #2

Would like to see a study of brain scans during flow, manual programming, compared to code review. If the conclusion is different parts of the brain are activated, then orchestration is a separate activity entirely. Reading code is not the same as writing code. However, the code review study needs to compare between surface scanning and reviewing long enough to get over a theoretical slough of perspective: when you a…

Many firms are going to go bust because of dangerous assumptions they made re. Expectations of llm improvements.

And they will deserve it.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#38

Post by est31 »

Re vendor lock in point: this is a harness issue really. Sure, CC is restricted to Anthropic models, but it's not the only harness out there. So if one vendor has an outage or botches the quality of their models due to compute shortage, you can switch to another vendor. LLMs are the easiest to switch. Of course, if hardware costs go up, so will all AI vendors. The only way out for the employer would be to directly buy the hardware (or do a fixed price deal with a cloud provider).

Re the understanding code point: you can still use LLMs to understand code. If you write the spec without knowing anything about the code, of course the architecture might suck. Maybe there is already a subsystem that you can modify and extend instead of adding a completely new one for the new feature you are adding, etc.

I use LLMs for my daily workflows and they do understand code perfectly and much more quickly than if I read it.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#39

Post by Saline9515 »

hunterpayne wrote: post #25
jdw64 wrote: post #17

How can we solve this at a more fundamental level? I think many people already recognize the problem: -“Our ability to write code is being damaged.” -“If our ability to write code declines, our ability to recognize good code also declines.” But the problem is that the market no longer works without LLMs. Freelance rates and deadlines are now calibrated around LLM-assisted output. Even clients who write “do not vibe c…

"How can we solve this at a more fundamental level?" Stop using AI for coding. Period...there is no other solution. You can't make it work, nobody else can either. Without determinism, the entire process is useless. We need to stop trying to act like we all know that this isn't true. We have given it a chance, it failed, time to move on to something else no matter how much the VCs and execs don't want to. Those that…

The issue is that you will end up without a job if the trend continues. It's similar to many cases of technical innovation - you can still have a few workers who do handcrafted works, but most of them have to use the machines, that may produce work of inferior quality but at much higher speed.

The market realigns, and unless you handwrite the highest possible quality at a quick pace, you won't be competitive with the vibe-coders who can fix a hundred issues a month.

It was the same with gps-assisted driving, now most people can't orient themselves autonomously. Worse, there are no roadsigns with directions installed, meaning that you are stuck with using the GPS.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#40

Post by einsteinx2 »

est31 wrote: post #38

Re vendor lock in point: this is a harness issue really. Sure, CC is restricted to Anthropic models, but it's not the only harness out there. So if one vendor has an outage or botches the quality of their models due to compute shortage, you can switch to another vendor. LLMs are the easiest to switch. Of course, if hardware costs go up, so will all AI vendors. The only way out for the employer would be to directly bu…

CC isn’t even limited to Anthropic models, there’s a post on the front page right now to use it with Deepseek V4 since Deepseek provides an Anthropic compatible API and CC reads API URLs from env variables so you can override them.
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