21–30 of 76 posts
With previous engineering trends like blockchains and microservices, you could choose not to jump on the bandwagon. However the coding agents trend is different and is changing the very fabric (sry for Claudeism) of software engineering, for better or worse. I do know we will never go back to mainly programming through code again, that’s for sure.
With previous engineering trends like blockchains and microservices, you could choose not to jump on the bandwagon. However the coding agents trend is different and is changing the very fabric (sry for Claudeism) of software engineering, for better or worse. I do know we will never go back to mainly programming through code again, that’s for sure.
There are still companies who refuse to believe this and still put Senior+ devs through hell during an interview process with junior level algorithm memorization. In all aspects there will be dinosaurs and deniers and there will be embracers.
One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are still companies who refuse to believe this and still put Senior+ devs through hell during an interview process with junior level algorithm memorization. In all aspects there will be dinosaurs and deniers and there will be embracers.
There is no such thing as "junior level algorithm". And one does not memorize algorithms.
This point seems lost on a lot of principals. I’ve had very little success with these grandiose designs and change requests from RFCs/specs. The context windows just can’t keep it all together and very quickly the approach unravels.
I posit that the further ICs were from writing code at this point in their career, the more they suffer from AI psychosis. It’s the same ivory tower they were already on, just a different order they’re giving.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are still companies who refuse to believe this and still put Senior+ devs through hell during an interview process with junior level algorithm memorization. In all aspects there will be dinosaurs and deniers and there will be embracers.
How can you assess the output of coding agents if you don't know about algorithms and other fundamentals of software engineering?
One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…
Yeah but on the other hand, if you asked an LLM to implement a spec and it was like “I skipped this part because I didn’t like the complexity tradeoff” most people would be like “wtf why doesn’t Claude just listen to me”
Now, it’s at the point where it’s like running a development team of very eager amnesiacs. I’ve found the trick is exhaustive documentation by a lead agent, and then having a fresh agent work as a coordinator across as many subtasks as the project sensibly allows. This way the individual components stay on spec, as does the ultimate integration. It’s only really this year that this workflow has started to actually function, and it still needs human supervision - but less and less over time.
I give it two years, tops, and everyone everywhere is building bespoke software because it’s trivially easy.