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Agentic Coding Is a Trap

larsfaye.com

371–380 of 403 posts

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#371

I've come to the conclusion that if AI can do it, its not hard. None of the complicated software i work on can be reliably written by ai yet

SotA models have cracked a handful of research-level math problems though. The default Claude Code style harness is bad for complicated problems as well. Just taking the specific class or function you're working on, and putting it into a deep research style loop yields way better results. Limiting the initial context by hand is still the way to go in a lot of cases.

That probably took a lot more tokens and iteration than normally invested in generating code.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#372
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding by hand is not mere typing symbols into editor that LLMs are now replacing, it’s thinking, abstracting, deciding how to apply your knowledge and experience, searching for information. And of course in the current workplace where there’s often a push from managers to use LLMs as much as possible and to put as much work as possible on yourself, in this churn junior will not get to learn anything besides promptin…

> thinking, abstracting, deciding how to apply your knowledge and experience, searching for information None of this requires coding by hand. I can do those things better and faster with agents helping me. That incudes unfamiliar areas where I am effectively a junior.

Do you describe what to write to llm, line by line, in excruciating details? Sounds like a painful way to develop.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what the coding world is going to look like in 5-10 years, but everything has changed radically in the space of a year from maybe 10% of people using agents to code to probably 95% of people now. In about a YEAR. Last I saw about a week ago, the stats were about 35%. There may be some confusion around this: 1. The absolute number could have remained the same but the sheer volume of vibe-coders who neve…

I don't know what industry you work in or what developers surround you, but the number of developers NOT using agentic coders in my workplace is 0. And I know this is the same in peers workplaces.

In my workplace number of “agentic coders” users is 1. And among principle and seniors - 0.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#374
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thinking, abstracting, deciding how to apply your knowledge and experience, searching for information None of this requires coding by hand. I can do those things better and faster with agents helping me. That incudes unfamiliar areas where I am effectively a junior.

Do you describe what to write to llm, line by line, in excruciating details? Sounds like a painful way to develop.

Line by line is no longer what I need to think about. I think about types/schemas, architectural division, contracts between services and components, how to test thoroughly, scaling properties, security properties, and these kinds of things.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now there actually is time to make things robust if you learn how to do it. What makes you think you are going to be given time to polish it? You would be pushed to another project. You have more responsibilities with none of the growth.

It takes very little time to polish now.

Again, provided you either had the skills.

Or you’re getting the model to do the polishing, thereby developing no skills of your own, and we’re back to the start.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you see the problem? Now engineers literally do not have any leverage. Did the model make it work? Yes? Then ship it, what are we waiting around for?

That sounds pretty much the same as it’s always been? It used to be: “Does the happy path work? Then ship it! There’s no time to make it robust or clean up tech debt.” Now there actually is time to make things robust if you learn how to do it.

That's an adorable idea, but requires willfully ignoring the existence of the Jevons Paradox.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#377
Seems to me that a lot of this discussion, on what you might charitably call the "AI optimist" side, conflates the concept of a "job" with an "assemblage of 'tasks'".

This is, alas, pretty consistent with SV technocracy through the ages. The same simplification instinct that compels people to see timeless human or political problems, for example, as mere insufficiencies of code or apps, invites this rather facile notion that a job with automatable tasks is a defunct job.

Tasks can be automated, to varying degrees. Jobs are a different thing from an economic point of view.

+1 to de-skilling being the main concern, per the author. Curating agents' output--a job no senior developer really wants--absolutely and totally depends on skills acquired by banging out code the hard way, potentially for decades.

Likewise, +1 to the keen insight that the tactile, motor-memory, man-machine process of typing the code is a vital discovery pathway to what you're actually going to write and how it's actually going to work, as opposed to specifying it in natural language. A model trained on the output of this process might spit out passably acceptable code in well-trodden, happy CRUD app paths, but it's not much good once you go spelunking outside that kind of domain. Ask me how I know.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you have 35 years of experience and have already built up the learning capability and general framework to acquire new knowledge. you know how to use agentic coding as a tool to supplement your work. the juniors who start today don't have that, they overrely on agentic coding and do not know what they don't know

> the juniors who start today don't have that, they overrely on agentic coding and do not know what they don't know Y'all need to stop worrying about the kids. They're smarter than us and will run circles around us. They're going to look at us like dinosaurs and they're going to solve problems of scale and scope 10x or more than what we ever did. Hate to "old man yells at cloud" this, but so many people are falling i…

You've got to be kidding me. I'd have never managed to become an engineering professional if smartphones were around when I was a horny teenager. There's simply no way.

The proof is in the fact that the savvy Atherton dwellers work hard to keep their kids away from the crack they themselves have foisted upon the world, or at least to delay or forestall the encounter.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. For example preliterate people have absolutely insane memory. In comparison my memory sucks. Having to use notes, look things up etc sucks. Literacy is a tradeoff but at least it can be argued to be worth it. Then there is smartphones. This is not the same. The tradeoffs compared to pre smartphones cannot be argued to be worth it imo and I was 20 years old when they were introduced. They make society and…

This is a curious choice of fields for you, if the last technology you think was a net positive was literacy !

Well, it was. But we still have to pay the bills.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#380
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

abstraction needs to be built on something. If there is little in your brain, there is little you can do with it.

I think everyone's just citing platitudes at this point. The earth will move on. Smart people will continue to exist. I'll bet on the smart people.

They're not platitudes. To paraphrase my software mentor, now elderly, on LLMs:

It's an impressive force multiplier, but there has to be some force to multiply.

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