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

dbreunig.com

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

#61

Post by quikoa »

energy123 wrote: post #47
raincole wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much truer today. You can say that article is extremely insightful, as it predicted today's open weighted models scenario 2 years earlier.

It remains an unproven hypothesis. The revenue of the top 2-3 labs is still growing nearly exponentially, which is the ultimate piece of data that settles the question empirically for now . Benchmark scores aren't really proof. Benchmaxxing is possible, for example. Only revenue numbers (and gross margins) count.

The ultimate piece is not revenue but profit. At some point these enormous investments will have to be earned back. Good luck with that when open weight models are also continuously improving, have cheap providers and for many are already very usable.

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

#62

Post by skydhash »

noelwelsh wrote: post #56
jmull wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, thoug…

Keeping complexity down is always a conscious act. Because you need to go past the scope of the current problem and start to think about how it affects the whole project. It’s not a matter of convention, nor refactoring. It’s mostly prescience (due to experience) that a solution, even if correct and easy to implement, will be harmful in the long term.

Architecture practices is how to avoid such harmful consequences. But they’re costly and often harmful themselves. So you need to know which to pick and when to start applying them. LLM won’t help you there.

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

#63

Post by azyc »

Stick to patterns which were painful before. For example, I recently refactored a project written in TS to use better-result instead of throwing errors. Without Claude writing out all of that boilerplate I could not have imagined transitioning to this. Right now the cost of "doing it right" is decreased so much there is no reason to ship slop / poorly thought out code.

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

#64

Post by zjaffee »

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.

Except here's the thing, that's the sort of code that was extremely expensive before, in large part because of our day jobs (which still to this day require mindfulness and can't just be vibe-coded).

However, an extra script here or there to make your life easier, adding extra UI features based on some datapoint to your internal dashboard, ect, these were things that could've taken a few days you didn't have before to get exactly right and now they can be done with only a few minutes of attention.

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

#65

Post by consp »

faangguyindia wrote: post #5

I am in India, junior developer hiring is all down. Ai has reduced offshoring to India and eliminated the need for janitor work (often offloaded to juniors). Many people are finding it difficult to even land internships. The most affected areas are sysadmin, devops, and frontend. Where you'll have very hard time getting any offer. Companies like BrowserStack are withdrawing campus placement offers. Meanwhile, I am wr…

Looking at the entire market in Europe it is also down but that is not due to "AI" but because they are easiest to fire with least consequences. There is a global recession looming, despite Wall Street saying otherwise.

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

#66

Post by dickeeT »

mxmlnkn wrote: post #34
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.

> 10. Code is cheap, but maintenance, support, and security aren’t. I also keep circling around this point. So many software repositories in the AI space seem to follow a publish and forget pattern. If you simply can show that you have the patience to maintain a project, ideally with manual intervention instead of a fully autonomous AI, then you already have an outstanding project.

yeah, if a project is purely vibe coded, it tend to need to be rewritten at some point of time

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

#67

Post by amelius »

amelius wrote: post #11
theshrike79 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even the programming languages will be made for AI.

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

#68

Post by asG1298 »

Guy works for the Overture Map Foundation, with Amazon, Microsoft etc. being sponsors. He has been boosting AI all over the Internet. I'm sure Microslop and Amazon are very happy with these efforts.

I'm glad that "10 ways to do X" submissions are allowed as long as they boost AI.

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

#69

Post by simonw »

asG1298 wrote: post #68

Guy works for the Overture Map Foundation, with Amazon, Microsoft etc. being sponsors. He has been boosting AI all over the Internet. I'm sure Microslop and Amazon are very happy with these efforts. I'm glad that "10 ways to do X" submissions are allowed as long as they boost AI.

Are you suggesting that Microsoft and Amazon's sponsorship of Overture comes with an understanding that people who work on Overture will spend their time writing articles that "boost AI"?

Does "boosting AI" include opening an article with "Frontier models are really good at coding these days, much better than they are at other tasks"?

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

#70

Post by melvinroest »

> What should we do when code is cheap?

Make usable software. Cheap code means that you can create a lot more prototypes to then perform usability tests by finding a user and sitting next to them. I mostly worked on internal apps lately, so perhaps it's much easier for me to do than it is for some others.

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