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Agentic Coding Is a Trap

larsfaye.com

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Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#311

Post by intrinsicallee »

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.

If the new way and speed of working makes you deploy things that you then become the bottleneck on the organizational knowledge of, and now the organization is running things in production that you have to go chase down details about and blocking other people, it seems like you just moved the problem from "needing time to do work properly" to "doing work then needing time to do it properly" which seems to me like a tremendous increase liability.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#313

Post by intrinsicallee »

monksy wrote: post #20

I kind of think this article misses the mark a little. There is skill loss from heavy AI use. But I want to acknowledge the awkward elephant in the room. AI Is making people too fast. I don't mean that a faster output is bad. It's a faster output and code rather than a full understanding and experience in producing the code. It's rewarding people who try to talk about business value rather than the people that are bu…

Bingo. All the clamor for more speed is driving erosion in the biggest asset class for most of the companies adopting these "accelerant tools": knowledge.

Everybody cargo culting winner takes all VC plays is gonna deprive everyone involved from building the knowledge assets they need to compete while playing into the hands of the winner takes all VC plays providing the tools driving all of this.

Seems clever from the point of view of the soon-to-IPO vendors behind these tools, and also seems extremely naive of all the people, teams and orgs buying into this ecosystems.

My current play is to do deep dives into fundamentals and stealth a team of like minded people to start putting out packaged expertise to help escape this quagmire.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#314

Post by satyrnein »

esailija wrote: post #260
echelon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the juniors who start today don't have that, they overrely on agentic coding and do not know what they don't know Y'all need to stop worrying about the kids. They're smarter than us and will run circles around us. They're going to look at us like dinosaurs and they're going to solve problems of scale and scope 10x or more than what we ever did. Hate to "old man yells at cloud" this, but so many people are falling i…

Not really. For example preliterate people have absolutely insane memory. In comparison my memory sucks. Having to use notes, look things up etc sucks. Literacy is a tradeoff but at least it can be argued to be worth it. Then there is smartphones. This is not the same. The tradeoffs compared to pre smartphones cannot be argued to be worth it imo and I was 20 years old when they were introduced. They make society and…

This is a curious choice of fields for you, if the last technology you think was a net positive was literacy!

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#315

Post by intrinsicallee »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #251
Terr_ wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a snapshot of your understanding of the problem Relevant: Programming as Theory Building (1985) by Peter Naur. The actual text is rather stuffy, but basically the code+docs cannot replace the richer in-human-heads ideas for what the real-world problem is and how computers should (or shouldn't) be used to face the problem.

>> a snapshot of your understanding of the problem > Relevant: Programming as Theory Building (1985) by Peter Naur. Great reference and I agree. From the abstract in the PDF I have of same: Peter Naur’s classic 1985 essay “Programming as Theory Building” argues that a program is not its source code. A program is a shared mental construct (he uses the word theory) that lives in the minds of the people who work on it.…

I'm truly amazed by what is happening right now. Software is a knowledge business. Teams and orgs compete on their capacity to learn, express and operationalize knowledge.

Yet everyone is buying into the discourse of a handful of vendors that they need to lock into their ecosystems and trade in their knowledge for short term speed gains.

It's brilliant from the standpoint of the vendors, and absolutely crazy that people are arguing vehemently that walking into that trap is a competitive necessity.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#316

Post by throwaway041207 »

amoss wrote: post #241
throwaway041207 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just as "use code for contracts" failed for crypto currencies, "use AI output as prod" will fail for AI. Both is based on "just don't make catastrophic mistakes anymore". What I think will happen is AI will write code and it will do the best it can to mitigate mistakes prior to rollout, but once rollout time occurs, rollout will be incremental and it will self monitor by defining success conditions at rollout time.…

> rollout will be incremental and it will self monitor by defining success conditions at rollout time. This sounds a lot like allowing an LLM to define tests as well as implementation, and allowing the LLM to update the tests to make the code pass. Recently people have come to understand (again?) that testing and evaluation works better outside of the sandbox.

Sorry I wasn't very clear about that part. I think success conditions are described by stakeholders, whoever that is, and then the implementation of monitoring them is probably created by the LLM. For engineering level stakeholders that's going to be metrics, performance, etc. Whereas for more business side stakeholders that'll be a mix of data metrics and product feature metrics, click-through rates, stuff like that

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#317

Post by lelanthran »

mempko wrote: post #131

Writing code is not the hard part of software development. This is coming from someone who has programmed for 30 years, writing an average of 100k+ lines a year. The sooner programmers start thinking about modeling the domain, user mental models, architecture and data structures and less focus on the mechanics of writing code, the better. Writing code is the EASY part. LLMs have basically solved the easiest part of s…

> The sooner programmers start thinking about modeling the domain, user mental models, architecture and data structures and less focus on the mechanics of writing code, the better.

You could have always had a role that did that; they're called BAs and most engineers didn't choose those roles because actually coding paid more.

Now that all the coders are also going to be BAs, the salary even for BAs will drop (increased supply).

You may think you want to be the person who only specs and never codes, but I doubt you want the salary of that person.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#318

Post by bmitc »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #135
byzantinegene wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you have 35 years of experience and have already built up the learning capability and general framework to acquire new knowledge. you know how to use agentic coding as a tool to supplement your work. the juniors who start today don't have that, they overrely on agentic coding and do not know what they don't know

Exactly this. We need to be more precise than blanket statements like "agentic coding is a trap" and start figuring out what a "tasteful" application of agentic coding looks like. ChatGPT is destroying liberal arts curriculums because students can choose to not do anything of the thinking themselves and produce mediocre work that passes the bar. I think the same problem is showing itself with agentic coding, just wit…

I think it's most easily summarized by: "It's still important to know things and what was important to know before hasn't really changed". If anything, agentic coding highlights and accensuates the need for good systems and software design knowhow.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#319

Post by yuye »

backwardsponcho wrote: post #280
ryandrake wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other. Off topic, but this must be a USA-specific problem, where prescription drugs are actually marketed at Joe consumer. I think there is maybe one other country where this insane practice is allowed. Nowhere else are patients told to “Ask your doctor about Procrapin for your irritable bowl syndr…

While I'm sure the US has its quirks, this is not a US-only "problem" (not a health expert so I'm not sure if it's even a problem to begin with). I live in Norway and have heard from lots of people (coworkers, friends, acquaintances) that doctors are very reluctant to prescribing anything at all - the running joke is that they'll advise you to "get some fresh air and go for a walk" even if you just broke your leg in…

>the running joke is that they'll advise you to "get some fresh air and go for a walk" even if you just broke your leg in half

Same in the Netherlands. Except it's not a joke and I've met enough people who've suffered avoidable long-term effects by apathetic doctors, including yours truly.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#320

Post by munksbeer »

lelanthran wrote: post #303
munksbeer wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neve…

I don't know what industry you work in or what developers surround you, but the number of developers NOT using agentic coders in my workplace is 0.

And I know this is the same in peers workplaces.

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