Just the intro section pretty much sums up perfectly my experience of using Astra (and prior AI models from OAI and Anthropic) for building large and semi-ambitious software. One step forward, two steps back.
Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
251–260 of 334 posts
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#252Earlier 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…
I have found that claude (opus 4.8 and 5) can do a very good job of implementing good architecture and system design if I can just steer it right. left to its own devices it does produce less than optimal code, but if I just spend a few minutes explaining how some pattern will improve the code, claude will go do it the right way, and can even have a pretty sensible discussion about the tradeoffs involved. so it does know about good code architecture and patterns, it just doesn't have the taste and initiative to use them without being told.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#253When 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
We're doing other things.
I've got projects that I really care about. Every line of code is written deliberately. It's great.
However, I can't afford to pay so much attention to everything that I do. There are only 24 hours in a day, and my mind has its limits as well. I've found that I can't reliably care deeply about more than two projects at once, and one is the ideal.
The point of AI, at least for me, is to do the other things that I've always wanted to do but never cared enough to. I just put the AI on the task and it gets done at some point, and I don't care if the code is "slop" because it wouldn't even exist to begin with were it not for AI.
While the AI is working on the things I've always wanted but never quite cared enough to do, I'm personally working on the projects I actually care about, or enjoying life in general when I get burned out. For example, a couple weeks ago I was playing video games while the AI was reverse engineering my laptop's BIOS.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#254I tried Astra and it started to fix issues in my code when I just asked a question about it. Then I spent half an afternoon to make sure we really didn’t need that change.
That felt so counter productive.
These models+harnesses seem to be getting better at yolo mode one shotting stuff at the cost of being a useful tool for more controlled software engineering.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#255Earlier 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. 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…
I have found that claude (opus 4.8 and 5) can do a very good job of implementing good architecture and system design if I can just steer it right. left to its own devices it does produce less than optimal code, but if I just spend a few minutes explaining how some pattern will improve the code, claude will go do it the right way, and can even have a pretty sensible discussion about the tradeoffs involved. so it does…
> left to its own devices it does produce less than optimal code, but if I just spend a few minutes explaining how some pattern will improve the code,
But that requires actually reading the output, which I am pretty certain only a rounding error of programmers are doing at this point.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#256Pretty happy with Luna. We use C# and add roslyn compiler MCP and Graft MCP, its super efficient and like infinite usage on plus plans. Maintaining 3 Rpeo with size of 360 K Loc. And a dozens of smaller repo collction together exceeds 500 K LOC in total. 3 team members 2 Luna account each. Product is piloting in a government use case with actual data. Nothing broke and has evaluated by state agencies on security aspects.
Edit: but we have strict workflow where thinsg are implemented after plan, proposal, features, task ledgering and then test coverage.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>> but I look at those same people’s code and it’s horrific, and then I find they haven’t made it far past a proof of concept phase. > 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. You then expand on methods and processes that work for you, but I think the crucial question that you do not answer is:…
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Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#258> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming…
It surely resonates if your reason for working is to extract wealth from others (ie. be a parasite) but if it's to improve things for everyone, then it's wonderful. You might still work just as much and get paid just as much but produce a lot more because of technology.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#259What is the author ranting about? I'm still not clear after reading it.
The code produced is not optimized for reading?
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#260I'd like to submit my counterpoint. I work on an established codebase building new features and fixing bugs. It has access to our story board, git and a couple of other mcps. As long as the story is well written with clear requirements and expectations it always produces quality code that I validate as a human with a variety of tests automated and manual. I peer review the code. My colleagues then peer review that to…
I don't think this is a counterpoint. An established codebase is already the best kind of context you could give an agent. It has all the patterns baked in so the agent simply follows established patterns. Such a codebase probably contains tens to hundreds of thousands of man-hours poured into it by humans refining it to do what it does - taking into account real world feedback and constraints. When working on someth…
> When working on something from scratch, the best an agent can do is the average of whatever is in its training set and the clarity of the text prompts.
Nah. The best it can do is to use the best writing style a model learned. Post-training might fail to prioritize it, though. Autoregressive pretraining does not average things. It creates a predictive model for variety of programming styles.