41–50 of 110 posts
> AI agents are just software, after all. I wasn’t going to understand them by reading prompt guides. I had to use them for real work, see where they failed, change the prompts, tools, or environment, and try again. AI agents are just software, so the only way to understand them is trial and error?
I committed to the fully agentic approach for a while. No code by hand! Setting aside the "capability" of the tools, I knew it was the wrong direction after a couple months or so in. I specifically remember during a large feature implementation running out of tokens for my 5 hour window or whatever, and I just couldn't continue on my own. Mostly due to laziness (I'll just wait till tomorrow when my limit resets!), bu…
Agents definitely run amok on code bases, create bloat, needless complexity, etc. However, they enable many people to do so much more than they could without them, at least in the moment, that they're not going to go away.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really isn't that hard. The LLM needs a few iterations of self review, and you need to ask it for an architecture up front, but from there, it's mostly manual testing to make sure the LLM didn't fuck up. I don't think it'd take more than a few weeks for a high schooler to learn how to prompt well.
Maybe - but I would argue that the skill comes in knowing if the architecture is appropriate and knowing that LLM is not screwing it up.
The skill is really in manually testing before handoff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"This is like if a plumber said. I no longer do any construction, I just tell people what to do." I'm pretty sure that's the dream goal of any plumber. No one "plumbs for fun". No one wants to truly do the actual thing, they want the money that allows them to do whatever they want. It's just that doing the actual thing is the only way you can get the money at first. And being good at doing the actual thing and enjoy…
Some people like doing DIY plumbing and related tasks around their own homes. Work might not be "fun" in the traditional sense, but it can be satisfying to build and fix things.
I feel a really odd dissonance with all these accounts. I have access to top models via Cursor at work. Every time I think to myself, here’s a tedious but well defined task, with clear success criteria, where you can achieve a lot with persistent iterations. I’ll give it to Claude to do. First, it takes me ages to describe the task properly. All these clear success criteria, well, instead of writing code from a clear…
I don't understand people that say "I no longer code" as a good thing. I think it's safe to assume that if you studied computer science or similar you like to code. If not, why did you even study that? To me it just feels like you want to be a manager not an engineer This is like if a plumber said. I no longer do any construction, I just tell people what to do. Then you probably aren't a builder anymore, you are a fo…
A manager has access to a larger, sloppier, and more powerful API than an engineer.
I've been a software dev for 25 years. In the past year I've hand written maybe 10 lines of code. For the first 2-3 months i would read it, then I figured out how to really use AI/code gen and the amount created was more than I could read. I can work on 2-3 projects at once, or 2-3 parts of a larger project at once. More than that I can't keep task switching. The speed and complexity of what I'm able to create is 10x…
I'm not sure how you can be confident the things "you" built won't crash if you're not at least scanning the code that you're generating.
> AI agents are just software, after all. I wasn’t going to understand them by reading prompt guides. I had to use them for real work, see where they failed, change the prompts, tools, or environment, and try again. AI agents are just software, so the only way to understand them is trial and error?