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Agentic Coding Is a Trap

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Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#301

Post by dionian »

ryandrake wrote: post #100

Using AI to go faster is optimizing the wrong thing. At every place I've worked, the "code writing" part takes the least amount of time, compared to all the other things you need to do in order to implement a feature. Let's examine a feature that takes a day to code: First, you've got to plan everything, using whatever Agile or Waterfall planning ritual your company uses, get the task breakdown, file the JIRA tickets…

i remember having to write design docs at one team about 15 years ago. dont miss that. usually was 90% waste.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#302

Post by dionian »

kelnos wrote: post #64
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #9

The thing is the code quality is still ultimately up to you Nothing stopping you from iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write

IME, it's faster and less frustrating to just write the code myself, if the goal is to get code to my quality standards.

how many LOC per day are you shipping

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#303

Post by lelanthran »

munksbeer wrote: post #290
blks wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything looks a nail for our hammer-shaped chat bot. I think you’re overly hyped if your actually believe this is going to be a reality in 5-10 years.

Up until about four months ago, the sentiment by so many programmers online (here, reddit, etc) was that LLMs were absolutely useless at coding. And yet, many of us were puzzled, because we were having success with them, at coding. People were burying their heads. Today, there are not many of those people left. Some, but not a lot. Because you can only deny reality for so long. I don't know what the coding world is g…

> I don't know what the coding world is going to look like in 5-10 years, but everything has changed radically in the space of a year from maybe 10% of people using agents to code to probably 95% of people now. In about a YEAR.

Last I saw about a week ago, the stats were about 35%. There may be some confusion around this:

1. The absolute number could have remained the same but the sheer volume of vibe-coders who never coded before raised the percentage. For example, if 100 out of a population of 1000 people uses AI then the percentage is 10%. If, over the next year 9k new vibers were created but none of the existing 1000 people changed their workflow, you will see 9100 people out of 10000 people using AI - that's now a 91% rate of people using AI to code even though none of the people since last year changed the way they work.

2. Last I checked, pre-AI, there were about 12m working developers in the world (SO survey extrapolated). As of February this year, CC, by itself, had 60k subscribers. Even if we err on the side of optimism and assume every single subscriber is running the agent, that's still not 95% of developers.

> I still think us "engineers" will have a role to play, but I genuinely don't know what it will look like.

??? We already know what it looks like - "Business Analyst" has bee a role since forever (at least since 1995, when I entered the workforce). If you wanted a role where you wrote no code but merely drew up specs for the programmers to code, you could have had it as a BA.

It's just that few of us wanted to do that as it paid half what an engineer made. Now with the supply of BAs potentially doubling, it will pay a quarter of what an engineer used to make.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#304

Post by intrinsicallee »

danenania wrote: post #172
FridgeSeal wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that will teach them something. If they care about getting better, This pre-supposes the idea that the business is _willing_ to let that happen, which is increasingly unlikely. The current, widespread attitude amongst stakeholders is “who cares, get the model to fix it and move on”. At least, when we wrote code by hand, needing to fix things by hand was a forcing function: one that now, from the business perspectiv…

If it’s broken and the dev can’t debug it, the business won’t have much of a choice.

There is a lot of space between broken and high quality that won't necessitate any business letting people "learn" on the job.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#305

Post by lelanthran »

josephg wrote: post #124
keyle wrote: post #79

As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". I really don't like these meetings where you're dragged in in the middle of them without any clue. The questions came flying in fast, without any introduction, and this was about an external integration out of a dozen. They have their own lingo, different from ours, to make the situation worse. I had a _very…

> As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other. Good doctors often refuse to give any drugs or any advice until they understand the whole situation properly. If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back again…

> If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back against behaviour you don't like. You have the authority. "Hm, interesting question. I'm going to need more context before I can give you my point of view. Can you give me a quick overview of the system architecture / explain what actual problems you're trying to solve with this approach?"

One of us misunderstood the GP; I understood him to mean that, because he did not write the code, he was not able to answer the questions based on that code.

You seem to think he meant that he could not answer questions on someone else's code.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#306

Post by whattheheckheck »

deweywsu wrote: post #211
FridgeSeal wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that will teach them something. If they care about getting better, This pre-supposes the idea that the business is _willing_ to let that happen, which is increasingly unlikely. The current, widespread attitude amongst stakeholders is “who cares, get the model to fix it and move on”. At least, when we wrote code by hand, needing to fix things by hand was a forcing function: one that now, from the business perspectiv…

This is what I have been thinking. Business will always try to do more with less because their only true goal is figuring out how to make more money. They will sacrifice giving those juniors time to learn from their mistakes for the sake of making more widgets (code). From the wider generational view, they will rob today's juniors from the chance to learn and thereby keep the talent pipeline full so they can profit t…

Why would a business train anyone when they can lean on the govt to provide unbankruptable loans to the student to go to university to learn themselves

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#307

Post by luodaint »

I have deployed a fully-fledged B2B SaaS product with authentication, multi-tenancy, real-time webhooks, three languages internationalization, all through Claude Code's loop. Skill atrophy is not an issue since I am not in competition with more experienced engineers. I am in competition with bigger teams who work slower.

The actual trap is not to write agency code, but to rely on it within a team environment where I fail to build a mental model. In a solo context, that cannot happen since the mental model will still fail for new cases, and I am the only one who can repair it.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#308

Post by whattheheckheck »

keyle wrote: post #276
maxrev17 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d just say to this.. who cares, drop the ego. The tool was used and if you didn’t use it you’d be in worse trouble. I just say I dno I’ll ask the AI… easy :D

Thanks, that's an interesting take from all that I've read. If you're happy for me to do the job in 1/10th of the time, be happy with me not being fully across it on a whim.

Dr. Chuck from python for everyone course said the same thing.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#309

Post by lelanthran »

childintime wrote: post #225
ryandrake wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of place do you work where you get dragged into a meeting halfway through and then are peppered with technical questions without context, that you're expected to answer on the spot? Please let us know because I'm sure a lot of us want to avoid such a place. "I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.

> "I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that. By the time you said that, the AI could have given the 80% answer. So, no, this is no longer an adequate response. The right response would have been to take your tools and give an informed opinion on the AI answer, right there.

> So, no, this is no longer an adequate response. The right response would have been to take your tools and give an informed opinion on the AI answer, right there.

If the AI could answer the questions, why would they ask OP about it?

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#310

Post by intrinsicallee »

bhagyeshsp wrote: post #294
lelanthran wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I struggled to code > ... > Comes in GPT-3.5, accelerated my learning. So now you can code? If I sat you in front of a computer with no internet and no GPU but your choice of IDE, you would actually be able to produce a product?

Attention Please Everyone You're looking at a specimen of one of the most rattled species nowadays. It is so fun finding them under these articles. Their last attempts at finding inner-validation. What a waste.

Hey man we all have our own skill levels and challenges and do all sorts of different work.

I don't want to shit on what you've done but you're coming in WAY too hot for how trivial your work is and how inflated your description of it is.

You're demanding humbleness while being extremely proud. Check yourself.

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