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

241–250 of 260 posts

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

#241

Post by g42gregory »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103
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 co…

> Software to do what, though ?!

Replace all Oracle Applications in the Enterprise, for example. That will keep Corporate IT/Dev teams busy for quite a while.

Of course, this does not involve Oracle infrastructure, such as Database.

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

#242

Post by mrothroc »

The list in the article looks like verification practices. Document intent, develop taste, find the hard stuff, etc. It assumes that when code is cheap the bottleneck shifts to knowing whether what you generated is actually right.

e2e tests can do a lot, but in my experience it's not enough. By the time the test fails you've already burned a generation cycle on an artifact that came from a flawed spec or design. I've gotten more mileage from having checks at stage boundaries (standard SDLC: plan, design, code, test). We all know the earlier you catch the mistake, the cheaper the fix.

The "implement to learn" is the same idea: you need to know enough about both where you want to go AND the path to get there to guide the agents to a proper implementation. You have contact with the world, both the users and the operational considerations that come from running software. Agents do not. We do the same thing with spikes, but now our spikes become far more sophisticated.

Code being cheap doesn't remove verification, it moves it earlier.

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

#243

Post by faangguyindia »

rirze wrote: post #203
aspectrr wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised sys-admin hires are down, is AI doing a lot of that as well?

Yah, that comment is odd. Sysadmins, Devops engineers will the be the last ones replaced by AI. The context window for their problems are huge. Unless you define Sysadmins and Devops as fiddling with YAML all day, which might be the case here.

>Sysadmins, Devops engineers will the be the last ones replaced by AI.

Most setups aren't properly documented which makes the discovery and exploitability part the major bottleneck when this is facilitated by AI, the sysadmin/devops team is downsized.

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

#244

Post by whattheheckheck »

nsxwolf wrote: post #234
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

Everybody’s cooking, nobody’s eating.

Pivot to be a user and demand requirements

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

#245

Post by [deleted] »

isaacaggrey wrote: post #139
peab wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I understood it in the spirit of “code is a liability not an asset.” Code still needs to be maintained, changed, etc whether that is by a human or LLM. In other words, just because more code can be produced quickly does not mean that it is cheap. edit: I’m maybe hearing your point is that LLMs may change that POV but I think that is TBD.

[deleted]

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

#246

Post by reus09 »

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'm seeing the exact opposite with LLMs. So much unmaintainable brittle code is being generated since devs are not even looking at the code and LLMs are dumb like 75% of the time

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

#247

Post by spicyusername »

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.

It can't happen without someone, but certainly it can happen with a lot less people, which is what's going to happen to the industry. Some days I'm shook to my core about how much I did relative to how long it would have taken just a year ago.

All software engineers will become product managers as the agents take over doing the bulk of the work.

Companies will either do the same with less or more with the same.

My opinion is that any company whose business model is selling software is going to go out of business.

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

#248

Post by spicyusername »

girvo wrote: post #113
zozbot234 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't say shipping a day. I said shipping at the same time.

The review comes at the end, though I truly believe this will go away as well. Agents will also get better at review until they're good enough that no one will want to do it anyways. Good enough is good enough.

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

#249

Post by spicyusername »

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?

I'm referring to things like spending a whole day pruning a jira backlog and cleaning up stale git branches.

Classic drudgery that were part of the day in the life that we're not directly writing code.

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

#250

Post by svantana »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #126
svantana wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" prompt…

If you prefer staying in denial, be my guest. But I've seen multiple instances of fully functioning software created by people who don't even know what code is. Maybe these creators are now developers, in a sense. But no SWE's were needed.
Post reply on HN