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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?

#121

Post by kusokurae »

mhitza wrote: post #78
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 genera…

It's just cope. I'm so close to just never coming back to HN because the quality of thought has just gone through the floor. Anything whatsoever to hedge one's way to fellating a phallusless chatbot

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

#122

Post by peab »

lionkor wrote: post #80

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 mak…

"Producing code has always been low cost"

Relative to what?

I don't understand people dismissing the massive decrease in both cost of producing code and the speed of producing code.

Before AI, people running businesses had similar issued as people have with AI now, but the costs were much greater.

They could hire someone to write them a prototype for their idea, but it would cost them on the order of 1000s of dollars, and it would take weeks at the minimum!

Now it could cost them 20$ and be done in a few days. The feedback loop is the bottleneck.

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

#123

Post by DrScientist »

noelwelsh wrote: post #48
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 agree. I do wonder if what I'm seeing is a limitation of the reasoning power of LLMs or if it's just replicating the patterns (or lack thereof) in the training data.

Indeed. On github I wonder what the proportion is between well engineered big systems versus throw away/student projects.

Even for the well engineered stuff I suspect there is a strong bias towards standalone projects versus larger multi-component systems.

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

#124

Post by zozbot234 »

peab wrote: post #119
alrtkh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Writing code" as a task of its own is called cowboy coding. It's neat that AI can do this now, but that has nothing to do with proper software engineering which always starts from a careful, human-led design.

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

#125

Post by storus »

I used to work as a VP and a part of my responsibilities was to chop up tasks to self-contained work units that can be easily assigned to random devs. This was both morally problematic for humans (i.e. EVPs forced treating human = CPU) and very optimistic when it came to individual dev capabilities and domain knowledge. However, this style is precisely what works well with agentic AI coding and I have no qualms to use it.

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

#126

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

svantana wrote: post #95
lionkor wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> automated dev systems They are large language models. Not automated development machines. They hallucinate. The goal post has not shifted since 2023 or so. Make an LLM that doesn't blatantly disregard knowledge it has, instructions it has been giving, over and over, and you win. If trillions of USD of investment can't do it, I'd be curious to see what can.

There are definitely automated dev systems, of which an LLM is a part. The remaining part may be called a 'harness' or whatever. The quality of the generated software is another matter. If the AI is not good enough, then don't fire the devs. If/when the devs are no longer needed, I don't see why the need would return later, that was my point.

A harness like Claude Code does not turn an LLM into a software developer.

If that was the case companies could just have their project managers managing Claude Code instead of developers, and they would immediately realize that using Claude Code to develop software is just as complex and geeky as it ever was - nothing changed in that regard.

A harness and a bunch of skills is just the new "think step by step" prompting technique. Don't just let the LLM rip and write a bunch of code, but try to get it to think before coding, avoid things like churning the code base for no reason, and generally try to prompt it to behave more like a developer not an LLM. Except it still is an LLM.

A coding agent is really not much different to a chat "agent" in this regard. You've got the base LLM then a system prompt trying to steer it to behave in a certain way, always suggest "next step", keep to a consistent persona, etc. None of this actually makes the LLM any smarter or turns it into a brilliant conversationalist, anymore than the coding agent giving the LLM a system prompt magically turns it into a software developer.

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

#127

Post by Tade0 »

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…

> fixing issues is now basically free if your company is willing to shell out for tokens.

Yeah, about that: I looked into Cursor's usage stats and daily I'm going through the equivalent of a bacon sandwich in my cantina, so not much, but this is at today's prices and very light usage of Sonnet.

I was for a time using Opus 4.6 for a heavier task and even then I think the cost was well into the double digit percentages of my salary.

Opus 4.7 reportedly uses more tokens overall and while they reportedly kept rates stable, that is not a given.

Just wait until, with increasing costs, the first company figures that they'll offer this as a benefit and then maybe scrap it altogether in the name of cost cutting.

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

#128

Post by DrScientist »

quikoa wrote: post #61
energy123 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The other point to make is that companies are starting to worry about the risks of externally hosted models.

This is at multiple levels if you have a remote API call as a key part of your workflow/software system.

1. Price risk - might be affordable today - but what about tomorrow?

2. Geopolitical risk - your access might be a victim of geopolitics ( seems much more likely that it used to be ).

3. Model stability/change management - you've got something working at the API get's 'upgraded' and your thing no longer works.

If you are running on open weight models - you are potentially fully in control - ( even if you pay somebody to host - you'd expected there to be multiple hosting options - with the ultimate fallback of being able to host yourself ).

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

#129

Post by raincole »

mhitza wrote: post #78
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 genera…

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

Yeah, and for Sonnet 3.5 or even GPT4o. Because it was true for many. Different people have different timing to reach acceptance stage.

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

#130

Post by gom_jabbar »

p2detar wrote: post #83
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. Can that happen without you? I would assume this is the next step. I don't find it either good or bad, but I'm genuinely curious where this all goes.

> I'm genuinely curious where this all goes

Maybe toward autonomous/sovereign capital with no humans in the loop, not even at the level of (asset) ownership.

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