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Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

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Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#241

Post by re-thc »

xgb84j wrote: post #198
taurath wrote: post #120

When the code is shitty it becomes harder and harder for the models to make changes and this grinds progress down to a halt - this has been my experience with “factories” trying them and doing refining steps every few months. I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing, because it must be somewhat trivial to not run headlong into these issues that stack up time after ti…

I am currently writing a lot of code that I am not reviewing anymore. These are all the things that make it work for me: - Work on small projects ( - Work for business people who want fast results. Agentic coding gets you to something presentable much faster at the cost of code quality. I have never seen a customer or business person care about that. - Have clearly defined API boundaries. Examples: If the back end is…

> Work for business people who want fast results. Agentic coding gets you to something presentable much faster at the cost of code quality. I have never seen a customer or business person care about that.

That's always false. It's like people want their meals delivered fast. They say they don't care about taste or how it is done. Watch when they get sick or don't like it and the drama that happens.

People don't care until they do. They don't know what to care (in this case code quality) or say that because you're not explaining it. People also "gamble" and you take the blame. Long term impacts? Nah doesn't matter. Weeks later and things break -- what did you do?

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#242

Post by wallst07 »

sdevonoes wrote: post #225
gps372 wrote: post #55

Early lesson I learned from AI engineering was - there is no substitute to giving a groomed epic to an agent. Instead of simply saying 'implement themes in my product' you need to be specific, in fact more specific than usual. You need to say exactly what is in scope and what's not, even down to a buttons, events and layouts. You can groom the epic with the help of AI, but final review must be done by someone who can…

But isn’t “grooming” the hardest part? To know the details means to know the codebases behind. So you do discovery, read code, ask people, check db tables, and then once you figure it out, you write a doc with the proposed solution. It gets reviewed and then you code it. I definitely need AI help for the discovery part… so it always starts with a simple “I need to do X”

You don't need to read the code manually line by line to do that. But yes, you need to know what you're doing.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#243

Post by ETH_start »

throwaway63467 wrote: post #240
vanschelven wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the explanation (for me) is that the slow down comes later, and that part of the cost is externalized to team members. If you go all-in agentic on a project that has at least reasonable code quality, you can certainly gain a temporary boost by stopping to read the code for a while. At least long enough to get yourself and the rest of the team hooked on the idea. Kinda reminds me of the "beginner's luck" probl…

Also my experience, it works somewhat ok on large code bases that I designed and built myself before but after months of agentic development they sure start to degrade. I think if you start from scratch with agentic development there is no foundation for the models to anchor to.

I suspect this is just because of context. The AIs have very limited context related to us. I suspect that this is partially a result of the AIs being forced to be highly generalized machines which will work out of the box with anyone's prompt so they can't afford to be tailored to a particular contextual pattern. This lack of a robust pre-defined contextual framework that is relevant to the human who is prompting them, coupled with limited inputs to what the human actually wants and sees, result in context drift as the agent continues to go down its own path.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#244

Post by Bluestein »

troupo wrote: post #171
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't this during the period where they had a bunch of bugs around caching and the models were making loads of weird decisions? I honestly feel like basically nobody knows anything about these models, it's all just vibes (and I'm no different).

Anthropic broke their models in spring, denied it, gaslighted everyone who said so, and then all but admitted it: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem (basically doing Anthropic things). > I honestly feel like basically nobody knows anything about these models, it's all just vibes This, too. Since only providers know what they actually serve, what they change and what limits they impose. There ar…

I am guessing (guessing) that "great coding model" and "great model for the widest use" (agentic, long-running, unsupervised, knowledge-worker, computer operator) are competing, conflicting endgames.-

Add to that:

- Of course, "labs" (quotes) are incentivized to throw coders under the bus and aim for the biggest possible market.-

- "Sharp, focused, brief, elegant, precise" editing, as would benefit the coding use-case, is actually token-saving, ergo, undesirable.-

The only thing that can stop this, would be the quality and functionality of the codeslop generated by these models to became so low that it actually interferes with the (alledged) recursive self-improvement of models (ie. models start to perform worse/degrade).-

Until such a time, we serfs, will eat what's on our plate, pay for it, and continue to kneel before the machine god overlords. And be glad for it.-

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#245

Post by Good4boothee »

nnevatie wrote: post #209
taurath wrote: post #120

When the code is shitty it becomes harder and harder for the models to make changes and this grinds progress down to a halt - this has been my experience with “factories” trying them and doing refining steps every few months. I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing, because it must be somewhat trivial to not run headlong into these issues that stack up time after ti…

> I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing Welcome to the present. Like many of us do not read the machine code generated by a C++ compiler, the code generated by an agent is similarly irrelevant and disposable, by now.

How does handling support tickets/bugs work with such approach? If LLM sometimes can't handle it - do I have to beg it to keep trying, as humans are no longer an viable fallback?

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#246

Post by lelanthran »

troupo wrote: post #22
idiliv wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the "compilers argument"?

People keep saying that "models are just compilers, and I don't see you complsining about compilers". Which is such a bullshit argument

> People keep saying that "models are just compilers, and I don't see you complsining about compilers". Which is such a bullshit argument

At what point do we normalise the message "This is a stupid line of reasoning and you should feel stupid for suggesting it, stupid!"

I mean, all the reasoned and logical arguments in the world doesn't change a religious follower's faith, but emotive ones regularly work! At what point can we start using shaming language on people who apparently don't know how neither an LLM works nor how a compiler works, but still trot out this argument as a cognitive kill switch?

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#247

Post by re-thc »

lelanthran wrote: post #211
dakolli wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even on personal projects, if I go through a few major features without reviewing the code, I always end up doing massive revisions that steal hours of my time and fill me with rage in the process. I'm not convinced this style of "agentic engineering" saves much time. I guess if I was oblivious to what good code looks like, and didn't care about maintainability It wouldn't bother me so much, but it legitimately has e…

> Even on personal projects, if I go through a few major features without reviewing the code, I always end up doing massive revisions that steal hours of my time and fill me with rage in the process. Where LLMs excel is in code-level bugs (as opposed to system bugs, design bugs, architecture bugs, integration bugs, etc). Talk with an LLM, ask them to rate both code and estimate dev experience based on that code, and…

> Where LLMs excel is in code-level bugs (as opposed to system bugs, design bugs, architecture bugs, integration bugs, etc).

Blame the benchmarks game. They're optimizing for that and that's what those things are measuring.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#248

Post by bigcheeto »

The first paragraph is unnecessary - why start off so arrogant?

I see this a lot in Asian writing - as if they have to first establish that the West is “doing it wrong” at the societal level before I get to read the rest of their usually unrelated message.

I didn’t like how the author classified all 3D gamedev as slop as if it’s a pointless endeavor - but talks about spending money on ChatGPT tokens to build a “software factory” as if it’s some ingenious plan. I don’t think the author realizes he is the slop dev.

And “shitty code” doesn’t mean anything in-and-of-itself. What are you making and why? A software factory???. It ain’t the code bro.

Anyway, I read enough.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#250

Post by defmacr0 »

nchie wrote: post #173
taurath wrote: post #120

When the code is shitty it becomes harder and harder for the models to make changes and this grinds progress down to a halt - this has been my experience with “factories” trying them and doing refining steps every few months. I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing, because it must be somewhat trivial to not run headlong into these issues that stack up time after ti…

For my side project where uptime doesn't really matter but the codebase is quite huge (gamedev of a multiplayer game with Bevy, so both server code, game code, content build pipeline, as well as a TON of editor and authoring code, probably 150k+ LoC), I've been moving towards just reviewing boundaries between modules, APIs, and schemas, and I'm pushing towards keeping things as modular as possible. If something ends…

This can easily lead you down a path of excessive modularity with each module being excessively complex though
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