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Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

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Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#51

Post by svantana »

codebje wrote: post #10
theshrike79 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will close the way back?

Brain drain. If you fire all your SWEs they won't sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for an AI collapse, they'll career shift. Maybe to an unemployment line and/or homelessness, maybe to something else productive, but either way they'll lose SWE skills. If you close down all the SWE junior positions you'll strongly discourage young people training in the field. They'll do something else. Then if you want to go…

Why would anyone want to go back? It seems likely that the automated dev systems will just keep improving and get faster, cheaper, stronger.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#52

Post by jmull »

I think you can boil down most of the list to: Understand what you want to do.

I’m not convinced about rebuilding repeatedly as a learning tool though. As relatively quick as it is, it over emphasizes the front line problems you face early. Those tend to be simpler, more straightforward issues that can be more quickly solved by a few minutes of thought (and more cheaply too).

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#53

Post by anilakar »

pell wrote: post #40
noelwelsh wrote: post #36

Certain types of code are cheap. Proof of concept is cheap. Adding small features that fit within the existing architecture is cheap. Otherwise, I'm not so sure. Coding agents are fantastic at minutiae, but have no taste. They'll turn a code base into a ball of mud very quickly, given the opportunity.

While I agree with you that agentic coding still has quite a way to go and is not always producing the quality that I would want from it, I can say quite confidently that its baseline is way above some of the production code in many applications many people use today. It really isn’t that code before agents was primarily written with taste and beautiful structure in mind. Your average code base is a messy hell full o…

[dead]

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#55

Post by fxtentacle »

est wrote: post #24
xandrius wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cutoff a generation of juniors from employment and learning , the seniors are gone and it's all harnesses and AI systems. I'm not all gloom and doom but the treatment of junior engineers is something I think we will either regret or rejoice. Either will have a spur of creative people doing their own independent thing or we'll have lost a generation of great engineers.

Today junior assembly language programmer are all gone, too.

Yes and that’s why I can charge premium rates for debugging. Most people cannot read a stack trace anymore.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#56

Post by noelwelsh »

jmull wrote: post #50
pell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you that agentic coding still has quite a way to go and is not always producing the quality that I would want from it, I can say quite confidently that its baseline is way above some of the production code in many applications many people use today. It really isn’t that code before agents was primarily written with taste and beautiful structure in mind. Your average code base is a messy hell full o…

I took the previous post, with its mention of the ball of mud, to be about complexity. “Taste”, is used in many cases, I suspect, to give a name the collection of practices and strategies developers use to keep their code and projects at a manageable level of complexity. LLMs don’t seem to manage complexity. They’ll just blow right past manageable and keep on going. That’s a problem. The human has to stay in the loop…

I think there are at least two factors behind ye olde ball of mud that LLMs should be able to help with:

1. Lack of knowledge of existing conventions, usually caused by churn of developers working on a project. LLMs read very quickly.

2. Cost of refactoring existing code to meet current best practices / current conception of architecture. LLMs are ideal for this kind of mostly mechanical refactoring.

Currently, though, they don't see to be much help. I'm not sure if this is a limitation in their ability to use their context window, or simply that they've been trained to reproduce code as seen in the wild with all its flaws.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#57

Post by 2ndorderthought »

torben-friis wrote: post #6

I 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.

LinkedIn is a circle of hell even dante couldn't imagine.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#58

Post by 2ndorderthought »

noelwelsh wrote: post #36

Certain types of code are cheap. Proof of concept is cheap. Adding small features that fit within the existing architecture is cheap. Otherwise, I'm not so sure. Coding agents are fantastic at minutiae, but have no taste. They'll turn a code base into a ball of mud very quickly, given the opportunity.

Preproduction code was always cheap or even free. Sales people have been selling software that didn't do what was on the tin since the dawn of time. Those features cost 0 dollars to write!

Production code. Especially production code with bugs is expensive. It can cost you customers, you can even get negative money for it in the form of law suits.

Coding agents are great for preproduction and one offs. For production I really wouldn't chance it at any scale above normal human output.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#59

Post by chasd00 »

pjc50 wrote: post #21
scorpioxy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The role of AI in non-software shops is going to be interesting. To a great extent it's not competing with devs, it's competing with Excel. However bad a system your AI can produce, it can't compare to the workflows that a group of non-techies armed only with Office can produce. On the other hand, like giving a supercar to a teenager, this just enables them to get into trouble faster. (the "my vibe coded app deleted…

> The role of AI in non-software shops is going to be interesting

I have friend in west Texas who does industrial electrical gear sales (like those giant spools of cable you see on tractor trailers). He’s 110% good old boy Texan but has adopted and loves AI. He says it’s been a huge help pulling quotes together and other tasks. Coincidentally he lives in Abilene where one of the stargate campuses are going. Btw, the scale of what’s being built in Abilene is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#60

Post by torben-friis »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #57
torben-friis wrote: post #6

I 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.

LinkedIn is a circle of hell even dante couldn't imagine.

Agreed, but a worrying amount of managers and leaders spend time there for reasons I never fully understood, so it offers a glimpse into their worldview.

The issue is that when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

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