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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?

#101

Post by j16sdiz »

oblio wrote: post #91
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…

> Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap. https://somehowmanage.com/2020/10/17/code-is-a-liability-not...

Kind of like credit card.

Every american learns how to live with debt :)

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

#102

Post by jnwatson »

zozbot234 wrote: post #89
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I regularly ship four features at a time now across multiple projects. Many people are missing the fact that LLMs allow ICs to start operating like managers. You can manage 4 streams now. Within a couple years, you may be able to manage 10 streams like a typical manager does today. IME, LLMs don't speed you up that much if 1) you're already an expert at what you're doing (inherently not scalable), 2) you're only wo…

A manager doesn't have to look at the code that's being shipped. An IC will still need to do that, and this will eventually take up much of their work. It can be addressed by moving up the stack to higher level and more strictly checked languages, where there's overall less stuff to review manually.

Just like a manager, you don't need to look at the code. You need to set up quality systems to provide evidence the code does what it is supposed to do, just like a manager.

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

#103

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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…

> Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap.

Software to do what, though ?!

Coding, maybe 10% of a developers job (Brooks "Silver Bullet" estimates 1/6), was never the bottleneck, and even if you automated that away entirely then you've only reduced development time by 10% (assuming you are not doing human code review etc).

I would also argue that software development as a whole (not just the coding part) was also typically never the bottleneck to companies shipping product faster, maybe also not for automating their business faster (internal IT systems), since the rest of the company is not moving that fast, business needs are not changing that fast, and external factors that might drive change are not moving that fast either.

I think that when the dust settles we'll find that LLM-assisted coding has had far less impact than those trying to sell it to us are forecasting. There will be exceptions of course, especially in terms of what a lone developer can do, or how fast a software startup can get going, but in terms of impact to larger established companies I expect not so much.

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

#104

Post by neya »

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…

What you are describing is a the role of a manager, not a software engineer. Software engineering has very little to do with writing code, but more on architecting at the higher level on what needs to be done. The code is just the executional part. LLMs can code? Ok good. Without a clear architectural pathway / direction, that code is just useless. It's not tech debt. It's just a bunch of random strings. You can argue that Claude code and others do create a plan of attack - but still, it's not at the architectural level, but rather executional level.

To me, architecture starts all the way from the top - even before you write a single line of code, you do the DDD (Domain-Driven Design) and then create a set of rulesets (eg. use the domain name as table prefix) and contexts and then define the functionality w.r.t to that architecture. LLMs can do all this - only if you ask them to explicitly. So, they are pretty useful to brainstorm with, but not autonomously design reliably and push it to production with your eyes closed and support a 100,000 user base. It's a far cry from that.

But sure, you can upsell to management about the vanity metrics like lines of code and get that promotion with LLM. But, it's still not software engineering.

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

#106

Post by __mharrison__ »

Would add my biggest tip to that: TDD. Most people omit it.

There is a difference between:

- write code, write tests

And

- write tests, write code

Had another agentic (vibe) coding experience, which confirmed that for me. Creating an SDK for a $500 light so I can control it from my Steam Deck instead of my phone (no SDK existed before yesterday). For anyone interested, I'm teaching my vibe coding (I meant agentic) tutorial at pycon next week. The 3-hour-long version should be posted to YouTube soon thereafter.

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

#107

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #89
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I regularly ship four features at a time now across multiple projects. Many people are missing the fact that LLMs allow ICs to start operating like managers. You can manage 4 streams now. Within a couple years, you may be able to manage 10 streams like a typical manager does today. IME, LLMs don't speed you up that much if 1) you're already an expert at what you're doing (inherently not scalable), 2) you're only wo…

A manager doesn't have to look at the code that's being shipped. An IC will still need to do that, and this will eventually take up much of their work. It can be addressed by moving up the stack to higher level and more strictly checked languages, where there's overall less stuff to review manually.

People typically think it's not a new person's fault if they come in to a team and bring down production.

That's a failure of the existing infrastructure to allow someone to do this.

LLM coding will work like this.

If you're letting LLMs go wild with no system in place to automatically know they're moving in the right direction and "shipping" things up to your standards, the failure is you, not the LLM.

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

#108

Post by duskdozer »

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…

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

Well, this explains why so much software nowadays is so slow, buggy, and chaotic.

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

#109

Post by Forgeties79 »

xantronix wrote: post #97
kiba wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone talks about productivity as if that is the only metric that matters in the business. The MCP has now automated away all of the drudgery of programming, from summarizing emails, to generating confluence documentation, to generating slide decks. I wonder about the hallucination. Reading someone's writing doesn't take all that long.

> the drudgery of programming Is programming supposed to suck all the time? Am I doing it wrong? I mean yeah, sure, it sucks sometimes, but overcoming that "suck" is where I feel progress and growth. If we decide to optimise that away...What the fuck am I doing here? No offence to managers, but if everybody is a manager, is anybody?

Feels kind of like the problem of everybody wanting to be an entrepreneur in the 2010s. Just led to people basically trying to get paid to be middleman companies skimming from others that don’t really need them, or worse, selling supplements and life coaching or whatever on social media and other grifts.

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

#110

Post by agency »

duskdozer wrote: post #108
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…

>I regularly ship four features at a time now across multiple projects. Well, this explains why so much software nowadays is so slow, buggy, and chaotic.

Unlike 3 years ago, when nobody complained about software being slow, buggy and chaotic
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