Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dbreunig.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 260 posts

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

#111

Post by jackcviers3 »

luodaint wrote: post #92

#10 needs more emphasis than it receives. Cheaper code doesn't automatically lead to good product decisions. Instead of focusing on whether you can build it, the scarcer resource becomes whether you should build it. And most teams lack a clear process for addressing this latter question. Requirements are collected in all sorts of places without ever being prioritized in an organized fashion. This is exacerbated by ch…

For most teams, whether or not you can say no to building something is ambiguous at best, at least if you wish to stay on that team and at that company. It's definitely one of the things that has made me vote with my feet in the past. With agentic coding, the ability to say no is pretty much gone because the perception is that it's just one more parallel thing we can throw an agent at.

The thing I see from agentic adoption that I find lamentable as a software engineer is that timeline expectations have collapsed to absurdity. You can plan a project to do a major migration, do all the estimations on how long something will take, and if you give an answer that says weeks and cite the evidence, product and leadership will now claim it should take days, citing their ai's design.

It's exhausting. Even if you are an expert, you now have lost the implicit trust that came from years of building political capital, shipping efficiently, and delivering value for multiple companies, because a different prompt with different context from the one you provide gave a different answer than what you did.

During delivery, if you read your code produced line-by-line and review for correctness, and put in additional guardrail automations that slow the automated build, and ship 4 times a day with a defect rate of 5.4% with agentic coding, you are compared unfavorably to teams with a change defect rate of 15.7% that ship 13 times per day, because you are too slow.

And you are individually compared with whole team outputs. Even if you deliver at a rate ten times greater than the worst contributor at your company, if you are not outputting code at the rate of an entire team of 5, you are not meeting the expectations of product and leadership anymore.

All of this is to say, yes, people are looking at software engineers as both the bottleneck and unnecessary, even at high technology companies, right now. They are looking at them that way because they have their own agents that are biased to think that the engineering claims are wrong and agents are sycophantic.

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

#112

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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.

There will always be competition. For every company negatively impacting customer experience and their own ability to compete, there will be others happy to step in and take advantage of that.

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

#113

Post by girvo »

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.

The dirty secret is all the people talking about shipping 4 features a day etc are just lying about reviewing anything. They don’t review it at all.

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

#114

Post by margalabargala »

neya wrote: post #104
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 argu…

Eh.

It's "not software engineering" but neither was what most people writing code did before LLMs.

> Without a clear architectural pathway / direction, that code is just useless. It's not tech debt. It's just a bunch of random strings

This is pretty clearly false. It's a bunch of random strings that you can compile and run to do what you want. It's more akin to a black box. A compiled closed source dependency.

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

#115

Post by oblio »

j16sdiz wrote: post #101
oblio wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :)

I don't feel so good, Mr. Stark:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/z1/nonfin...

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

#116

Post by miltonlost »

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"?

How is that not boosting AI? It's certainly not denigrating it

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

#117

Post by wilkystyle »

hansmayer wrote: post #100
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your linter should identify all issues - including architectural If a linter could deterministically identify bad architecture, you wouldn't need an LLM, your linters could just write your code for you. The vibe coding takes are just getting more and more empty-headed...

> If a linter could deterministically identify bad architecture, you wouldn't need an LLM, a) that's not what a linter is built for, its a tool with very specific role b) You must've never seen LLM expose secrets in plain text or use the most convoluted scenarios you can think of.

I think you missed the point of the person you are replying to.

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

#119

Post by peab »

alrtkh wrote: post #79
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 longe…

How can you say it has "nothing to do with software engineering" with a straight face?

I think you might be in serious denial.

Of course writing code isn't the only task of a software engineer, but it's an important one.

There wouldn't be so much controversy if it wasn't the case

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

#120

Post by kusokurae »

agency wrote: post #110
duskdozer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

Incredibly impressive how, the moment AI becomes the topic of conversation, trivial things such as speaking in relative terms become incredibly difficult for the more addled of the prompting users.
Post reply on HN