Realize it's going to be 10-100x more expensive once you have no way back?
What will close the way back?
Time. In a few years there might be no old-school way to develop anymore. Everything will be built around AI.
Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
11–20 of 260 posts
Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
#12Realize it's going to be 10-100x more expensive once you have no way back?
What will close the way back?
The problem of "instant legacy" systems: something that's vibe coded and reached unmaintainable by either the AI or humans, but is also now indispensable because users are relying on it.
Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
What will close the way back?
The problem of "instant legacy" systems: something that's vibe coded and reached unmaintainable by either the AI or humans, but is also now indispensable because users are relying on it.
I'm curious if this will cause a drop in quality that will lead users to generally lose trust in software.
Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
#14I came here exactly to point out what I'm glad to see is 10. "Free as in puppies" is a wonderful way to put it. Every time I open linkedin I'm scared of how many big heads have taken the wrong lesson that coding almost free == free engineering. So many bait posts asking engineers why they would need to pay them any longer, or being glad they're generating millions of lines a month....this is going to end badly.
I had a business owner tell me that they don't need to hire juniors anymore because claude can do all of that work for them. This was not a software shop so it's not even about writing code but I also thought that was something that will bite in the near future. A business that is not investing in juniors is a business that is not investing in the future.
Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
#15Realize it's going to be 10-100x more expensive once you have no way back?
There is no moat. https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat...
Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
#16Apart from (2), the first seven lessons are exactly identical to good project management practices with humans. Which are also the difficult bits.
Once upon a time, highly bureaucratic organizations tried to make a distinction between "analyst", "programmer" and "coder": https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/the-myth-of-the-coder/
The pure "coder" role, per that paper, died out almost immediately. Nowadays it's done by compilers (a deterministic automation). The distinction between analyst and programmer held out a bit longer - ten years ago I was working somewhere that had "business analysts", essentially requirements-wranglers. It's possible that the "programmer" job of converting a well-defined specification into a program is also going to start disappearing.
.. but that still leaves the specification as the difficult bit! It remains like the old stories with genies: the genie can give you what you ask for. But you need to be very sure what you want, very clear about it, and aware that it may come with unasked-for downsides if you're not.
Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem of "instant legacy" systems: something that's vibe coded and reached unmaintainable by either the AI or humans, but is also now indispensable because users are relying on it.
I'm curious if this will cause a drop in quality that will lead users to generally lose trust in software.
Some of that is already there .. but the users generally have nowhere else to go and ineffective pushback. "Enterprise software" has been awful for decades, things like Lotus Notes and SAP. Everyone hates Windows; everyone continues to use Windows.
Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
#18I've found the get-shit-done tool[1] to be quite useful for forcing me to properly plan the implementation and ensuring the context remains small and relevant at all times. It is slower than when I was just using Claude directly though. [1] https://github.com/gsd-build/get-shit-done
I've tried this, it's honestly not worth the amount of time (and additional context) for the results. I've had more success prompting Claude with manageable and testable iterations. Planning is good but get-shit-done just added too much planning in my opinion.
It seems there is a new version [1] - I'll try it out and see if it is better.
Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
#19I came here exactly to point out what I'm glad to see is 10. "Free as in puppies" is a wonderful way to put it. Every time I open linkedin I'm scared of how many big heads have taken the wrong lesson that coding almost free == free engineering. So many bait posts asking engineers why they would need to pay them any longer, or being glad they're generating millions of lines a month....this is going to end badly.
This is a repeat of paying devs by SLC(source line of code).
Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem of "instant legacy" systems: something that's vibe coded and reached unmaintainable by either the AI or humans, but is also now indispensable because users are relying on it.
I'm curious if this will cause a drop in quality that will lead users to generally lose trust in software.
See Windows 11