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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?

#71

Post by melvinroest »

zjaffee wrote: post #64
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 t…

Yea, the amount of dev tools I'm creating per project is astounding. Usually tools that help me to debug certain things better.

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

#72

Post by 16bitvoid »

simonw wrote: post #69
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"?

Can't speak for the former, but the latter question: yes.

"Product is really good at X, much better than at Y" does not imply that it's bad at Y, and even if it did, if you're targeting an audience that only cares about X, who gives a shit about Y? Might as well throw Y under the bus to boost the perceived effectiveness of product at X even more in comparison.

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

#73

Post by GrinningFool »

LurusCode wrote: post #23
user34283 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you reconcile these ideas with the fact that cheap open weight models are only slightly behind the state of the art? If anything, I would bet that next year you could get today’s flagship performance for significantly cheaper via an open-weights model.

You can easily develop with models like GLM 5.1 and Kimi k2.6 at a fraction of the cost of GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.7. Requests often cost just a few cents. Open-source models have caught up tremendously recently. Those who can’t or don’t want to invest a lot of money can already develop with Kimi and GLM without any problems. We don’t have to wait another year for that.

Tried deepseek 4 w/ CC yesterday, and was watch my usage eke up by only 0.01 at a time while doing plenty of high-token-count tasks. I understand it's currently at a discount, but even after that expires the same-quality output will be available at a fraction of the cost of the expensive models.

From experience, the same level of usage would have left me stranded on my CC 5 hr limit within an hour.

There were some difficulties with tool calls, in particular with replacing tab-indented strings - but taking no steps to mitigate that (which meant the model had to figure it out every time I cleared context) only cost relatively few extra tokens -- and it still came in well under 4.6, nevermind 4.7. And of course, I can add instructions to prevent churning on those issues.

I have no reason to go back to anthropic models with these results.

"No moat" indeed.

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

#74

Post by spicyusername »

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip.

Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists.

Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's contained in the commit.

Every MR now has detailed information about what's being merged.

Every code base in the teams around me now has 70 to 90%+ code coverage.

Every line of code now comes with best practices baked in, helpful comments, and optimized hot paths.

I regularly ship four features at a time now across multiple projects.

The MCP has now automated away all of the drudgery of programming, from summarizing emails, to generating confluence documentation, to generating slide decks.

People keep screaming that tech debt is going to pile up, but I think it's going to be exactly the opposite. Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap.

Most code before llms sucked. Most projects I on-boarded to were a massive ball of undocumented spaghetti, written by humans. The floor has been raised significantly as to what bad code can even look like, and fixing issues is now basically free if your company is willing to shell out for tokens.

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

#75

Post by GrinningFool »

orangecoffee wrote: post #41
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.

This is not happening at least for 25 years, is what seniors I trust tell me.

I'd say closer to 10-15 but... I'm not sure the point you're making. Is it okay because it's 25 years in the future?

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

#76

Post by GrinningFool »

tdeck wrote: post #13
pjc50 wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

Users don't currently trust software. Look at what we've done to them - can you blame them?

The consumer space is about extracting every ounce of personal data possible.

The b2b space is about "maximizing customer value" - that is, not maximizing the value of your product to the customer, but maximizing the value of the customer to your business. Lock them in and lock them down, make your product "sticky" so they can't leave without immense cost.

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

#77

Post by Gigachad »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #15
boesboes wrote: post #2

Realize 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...

It’ll be priced slightly higher than the cost to actually run. But it’s still not clear what the real cost of the big models is. They seem very subsidised, but by how much?

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

#78

Post by mhitza »

spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

> GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip.

You know this is the exact same thing said during Opus 4.6, right?

That makes it hard to believe because it's the same "last week's model was so much behind you can't even comprehend" meme that's been going on throughout last year.

More info dumped into tickets and projects is great for understanding for both people and LLM. But hopefully not LLM generated.

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

#79

Post by alrtkh »

spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

For people who like to tick boxes, which is essentially most of the above, AI is welcome. That includes managers.

It still has nothing to do with software engineering. All good code was written by humans. AI took it, plagiarizes it, launders it and repackages it in a bloated form.

Whenever I look deeply at an AI plagiarized mess, it looks like it is 90% there but in reality it is only 50%. Fixing the mess takes longer than writing it oneself.

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

#80

Post by lionkor »

If writing code was the only part of the job, and it was easy, these jobs wouldn't pay so well.

Engineering is hard. It's always going to be hard. I'm glad that AI makes some parts of it easier, and we (software engineers) can focus on engineering, that's nice.

Code is NEVER cheap. Just because, at current completely unrealistic AI pricing, using agents is cheaper than hiring juniors, does not make code cheap. It makes producing code cheap, which has always been low-cost. Every line of code is a cost, is a maintenance burden, is complexity. An AI, even with somehow infinite context window, will cost more money the more code you have.

Could you replace a whole team of engineers with AI? Probably, yeah. Could you simply fire everyone at your company and close it down, without much of a problem? Also probably yes, for most companies.

AIs can help with debugging, can help with writing code, with drafting designs, they can help with almost every step. The second you let OpenAI, or Anthropic, take full code ownership over your products, and you fire the last engineer, is the time when the AI pricing can go up to match what engineers make today. You've just reinvented the highly paid consultant.

Or you could take the middle-ground and hire good engineers, make sure they maintain an understanding of the codebase, and let them use whatever tools they use to get the job done, and done well. This is the way that I've seen competent companies handle it.

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