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The Coming Loop

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: The Coming Loop

#261

Post by charly187 »

wolttam wrote: post #126

I am 100% for fully agentic loops... for tasks other than engineering. I'm not willing to outsource the understanding how things work part of myself. That part of myself is what got me into computing in the first place. If this work becomes simply a matter of describing intent to a machine (probably through an Issue, like a user), and going to check on the result when you get the 'done' notification: I'm done. It's p…

> If this work becomes simply a matter of describing intent to a machine

What is it that you think you are doing when you are writing code if it isn't describing intent to a machine? Whether you are doing it imperatively vs declaratively isn't a new thing.

Re: The Coming Loop

#263

Post by miki123211 »

jr3592 wrote: post #238
miki123211 wrote: post #236

This ties into something I have been saying for months: LLMs are great at finishing tasks, but bad at aesthetics and taste. There are two kinds of work: One is goal-driven work, where we have a goal to achieve, and we care very little about how we get there. Security is a perfect example; if you want to exploit a system, you rarely care about how beautiful the exploit is, all you want is access to those super secret…

> Note that maintainability and code quality aren't synonymous, code quality is just a means to an end, and that end is maintainability. Many orgs are quickly moving to a world where code quality and maintainability are not a priority, at all. If claude is just going to write the code, does it matter "maintainable" or "quality" it is? No. It just matters if it works, and if its fast, is how the perspective goes.

Maintainability is just the inverse of the expected cost to make a future change. Future changes matter, so maintainability matters.

It is, however, true that we don't yet know how to achieve maintainability in the age of LLMs, and whether it keeps being synonymous with aesthetics and code quality as time goes on.

Re: The Coming Loop

#265

Post by wonnage »

jschveibinz wrote: post #226
stillpointlab wrote: post #215

My experience is that I am bottle-necked on specs. The agent loop is less of a thing for me now. If I can get a clear understanding of what I want to build, communicate that to Claude Code in planning mode with the goal to write an actionable spec (not code, plan to write the spec) then I tend to get very good results once the agent goes to implement. But this strategy, while effective, puts a big load on me to write…

This is exactly the way it should be! This is great! This is the most important part of engineering of systems that has been minimized over the past two decades in the rush to build. Now that the building is more automated, the specifications and system design can take the important lead again. Engineering and quality might be back!

Joke’s on you, Claude is writing that too

Re: The Coming Loop

#266

Post by lhysdl »

Andrej Karpathy says, “You can outsource your thinking, but you cannot outsource your understanding.” The catch is that we need to think in order to build understanding.

Re: The Coming Loop

#267

Post by stillpointlab »

godelski wrote: post #247
stillpointlab wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, but I have to direct it and review it. That means I have to think about it, research it, consider how the new feature or system fits in with the existing feature or system. I have to make decisions on libraries/dependencies. I have to consider how the project will evolve in the next week, month, quarter. I communicate all of that to Claude in an interactive planning session and it outputs a detailed spec, re…

How do you expect it to give you what you want if you don't think about it? Solution spaces for even seemingly simple problems is incredibly large. There's a reason there's a thousand different types of nails and a million types of screw heads. Just making every screw head Phillips (or pick another) doesn't just make things work. But you need expertise to know these things. They're the issues that are subtle and appe…

I agree, but that is the crux of my initial post. There is a ceiling to how quick I can deliver using LLM coding agents which is the speed at which I can write good enough specs.

I feel I'm at the point now where the time the LLM takes to deliver a feature, no matter how big, is nearly inconsequential. Because while it is in the process of delivering the feature, I am writing the next spec, and by the time I finish the spec the agent is waiting for the next feature. And at that point I have to review it's code, give it feedback, review it's fixes, merge, etc. All of the "waiting" is on me. It is basically delivering features as fast as I can write specs and could only get faster if I write specs faster.

Re: The Coming Loop

#268

Post by ianm218 »

camillomiller wrote: post #34
joenot443 wrote: post #30

We've had great success with agents thus far at my job. A year into Clauding and all our dev metrics are up while our downtime has remained steady. Being an iOS engineer, much of my engineering cycle these days is going from Figma/PRD → spec → code. After being handed off to QA, we handle the bugs and product slips as they come through, while we simultaneously build/spec the upcoming addition. This is basically the s…

Would you have a breakdown of costs/benefit? Can you say with certainty that this workflow has increased productivity so much that you are seeing profit increases that you wouldn't have otherwise noticed just by hiring more people? Asking with no ill intention, I just crave for actual business cases that make sense, and yet no-one seems to be able to reliably produce that.

> Can you say with certainty that this workflow has increased productivity so much that you are seeing profit increases that you wouldn't have otherwise noticed just by hiring more people?

Has the bar raised so much that coding agents need to be even better than any human could do? If the coding agent lets you get done with 1 person what would've required a team of three and you are not going crazy "token maxxing" spending thousands of dollars a week that would be beneficial for a business.

Re: The Coming Loop

#269

Post by ianm218 »

camillomiller wrote: post #2

Show me the billion dollar solopreneur startup, or the profit increase for companies and at that point I’ll start thinking that this tasteless high level wanking might make sense in some way

This company got valued at $250M https://polsia.com/ and is a one person startup. Lots of people think its more or less a hype job but given "ai agents" have only really existed for a year or two now it's sitll early days.

Re: The Coming Loop

#270

Post by jongjong »

throwaway7783 wrote: post #256
jr3592 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note that maintainability and code quality aren't synonymous, code quality is just a means to an end, and that end is maintainability. Many orgs are quickly moving to a world where code quality and maintainability are not a priority, at all. If claude is just going to write the code, does it matter "maintainable" or "quality" it is? No. It just matters if it works, and if its fast, is how the perspective goes.

I think we have to wait and see if long term maintainability will be any different from human coded software. Every single long surviving human written codebase I have worked with, has significant amounts of tech debt and large pieces had to be rewritten from time to time. This is of course anecdotal and I'm sure clean and elegant old codebases exist somewhere.

The worse designed the code, the more frequently it has to be re-factored. I've worked on long running projects which required essentially no refactoring when implementing new features and I've also worked on projects which had to be re-written multiple times to accommodate requirement changes.
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