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Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

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Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#61

Post by nonethewiser »

springtimesun wrote: post #57

I’m m just starting to get results on a local/cloud agent pipeline I’ve been building. I don’t think I will ever code again. Plan, review, read, architect, test, yes. Code though simply doesn’t make sense when I’m getting these results at this velocity. Every few months it feels like I have moved further up the chain. Now I don’t even look at a PR until it’s been coded and gone through at least 2 AI reviews (always d…

It's a mindset shift from producing code to producing a product. You may look at the code and see slop but look at the product and see value.

This should be extremely intuitive. We know this already. There has always been a divergence between product value and code quality. How many codebases that are widely used are kind of a mess inside? Pretty much all of them to some degree. This is a basic reality of software engineering. Conversely a useless product could have the cleanest code in the world.

Some slop accusations are fair. Others are people essentially expressing that they dont like shifting to a product mindset.

I dont have your whole pipeline but I recently took a step back and thought about how amazing the AI is. I recently gave Fable a nice, simple open source TUI app with some Claude Design artifacts for a UI/UX facelift + some new complex feature requests and it just one shots the entire thing in 20 minutes. It works great and looks amazing. It's significantly better in terms of UX and functionality than the original. I did this on the side with about 15 minutes of active attention while I was working.

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#62

Post by qwah15 »

I have stopped reading blog posts for 6 months now! Since Fable-1337-B4242 agents became so good at reading that I delegated this load-bearing task. Once I became weak and read a paragraph, but I was reminded that reading is too laborious.

After reading this blog post for me, Fable-1337-B4242 asked me if I also wanted to create a load-bearing plain text website like exe.dev using agentic forces.

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#63

Post by springtimesun »

simonw wrote: post #51
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #34

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.

Your hypothetical high schooler would have to learn what architecture is, and then what self review is, and iteration, and manual testing... and what "code" and "software" is first.

This is something devs don’t give enough credit. You may think you’re just promoting, but ask someone outside the field to prompt their way to a feature and you will see very clearly what your experience is bringing to the table.

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#64

Post by jplusequalt »

pranit1 wrote: post #54
jplusequalt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 You serve no purpose here. The AI will soon be able to prompt itself, and it will be better at system design than you. Good job at making yourself redundant.

I think you will always need a button pusher. whether it is the CEO, the product manager or the developer themselves. You will need some sort of overseer who will take accountability of the system that is generated by the AI.

>I think you will always need a button pusher.

Okay. Is that job going to provide a competitive salary, with good benefits? More importantly, is it going to be personally fulfilling?

Software developers who have adopted agentic coding are worse than class traitors. They are actively sabotaging the entire careers future viability, and have made me ashamed to think anyone in this industry was worthy of the title "engineer".

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#65

Post by nonethewiser »

rich_sasha wrote: post #35

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…

Take a step back and give it the essential functional requirements.

Or, consider what information is driving your extremely detailed instructions and give it the raw source if you can. Meeting transcripts, messy notes on some adhoc conversation, etc.

The more you try to micromanage it, the more impossible to work with it it is.

Of course not every situation calls for just giving it high level requirements. But not every situation calls for trying to define how everything is done yourself either.

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#66

Post by Balooga »

grim_io wrote: post #8
gonzalohm wrote: post #5

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…

Do architects have to like laying bricks?

There is the level of understanding of the concept of a Quicksort function, how it works, when to use it.

And then there is the level of understanding gained of opening up an editor and trying to write a Quicksort function in Go or C++ or Python or whatever.

I wouldn't consider the latter to be "laying bricks".

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#67

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

springtimesun wrote: post #63
simonw wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your hypothetical high schooler would have to learn what architecture is, and then what self review is, and iteration, and manual testing... and what "code" and "software" is first.

This is something devs don’t give enough credit. You may think you’re just promoting, but ask someone outside the field to prompt their way to a feature and you will see very clearly what your experience is bringing to the table.

Yeah, but train them for a month on how to get the AI to help them prompt, and they'll do fine. AIs are extremely effective at letting you offload skill, you just need to know how to ask. This should surprise nobody, since this is what they were and built for.

I genuinely don't think you need much training for creating code any more. The skill can be offloaded.

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#69

Post by beej71 »

lostnfound8778 wrote: post #3

> The bigger cost was the typing. Every time I wanted to build something, I could see the code in my head. I just couldn’t type it out fast enough. Facts. For me the bigger the gap between what i saw in my head and the speed with which my fingers could physically make it a reality the more stress i would feel and some marathon coding sessions would end w my back all messed up just from the tension

Disclaimer: I'm an older dev out of the game. I could definitely see the bigger picture faster than I could type it (except for challenging tasks), but that typing time was also synergistic thinking time. Not unfrequently, I'd find a better design while writing the code. Even if it didn't make it into that codebase, it could be filed away for future reference.

Edit: I recall reading somewhere that John Carmack doesn't care about which editor he uses because typing was never the bottleneck. Admittedly, he worked on some really difficult problems.

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#70

Post by alexpotato »

Couple points:

> Instead of waiting, I spun up another agent to do something else. Then I did it again.

> I wasn’t intentionally building a parallel system. I was just filling the time between tasks. I have ADHD. I got distracted.

I probably have ADD or ADHD and this feels "great" at first b/c you can just jump back and forth between 2-4 agents as they need input from you.

But I noticed:

1. I was EXHAUSTED at the end of the day

2. A lot of what each agent was doing I could do faster myself. Yes, if I do 10 units of work and 4 agents do 3 units then it's faster. That being said, sometimes all of the agents pick the dumb/slow path and now it's 4 agents times -2 units

> Having other agents review the code worked surprisingly well. They occasionally caught real bugs, and it was cheap enough to run several reviews. But I couldn’t merge something just because the agents approved it. I still had to understand the change. I was still responsible for the code that got merged.

My personal opinion is that LLMs have:

- 5x increase in triaging/debugging b/c they can read code WAY faster and make connections really quickly

- 2-3x writing code if you ALREADY have great, rock solid unit tests etc

- -1x to 1.5x improvement in writing greenfield code where you have no tests

That last one is b/c you are never 100% sure that the test is doing what you expected or the LLM is "hacking the test" (unless you REALLY read the code).

I think this disparity in performance across different sub-domains of being a SWE/SRE is why you get so many different opinions on LLMs

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