Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again? • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by brabel » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:09 PM UTC

iforgotmypasswo wrote: post #279

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’ll try to explain how to do it correctly. I’m not selling anything. Seeing this as the top comment makes me a bit sad. 1. Learn about ports and adapters as an architecture pattern. Domain driven design and locality of reasoning are your new best friends. 2. Realize that AI can generate unlimited fake data almost immediately. So anything you can isolate can get a fake adapter and a real one. You can build and test a…

Great comment. I don’t do everything you say but still get very high quality code out of Opus 5 with Claude. Fable 5 can be even better but I haven’t proven it enough to be confident yet. It may get off the rail if you’re a bit ambiguous about what you want , but that is only rarely a problem lately. We invested early in good AI instructions while still keeping the context small . We also have lots of skills the AI is instructed to use under different tasks (eg it must always span a subagent go review code, test creation skill, planning procedure etc). When all is done I just can’t believe any human could have done a better job.

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

#312

Post by Seattle3503 » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:10 PM UTC

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…

A lot of them do complete re-writes frequently. When code is cheap and you get stuck, thats what you do.

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

#313

Post by owebmaster » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:15 PM UTC

d5lt5 wrote: post #152

elAhmo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing to disprove as you don't understand what does a word mean. Deterministic is not a spectrum, they can either be deterministic or not. In both cases, they are not.

Oh, I'm so sorry I touched your paper feelings. How dared I to imply that some LLM output is more deterministic than the other, your LLM majesty. Shame on me and my entire family! For generations to come! So sorry I implied that the code that doesn't work and has to be fixed later is deterministic in its execution and can be reused later instead of being re-generated from scratch! Will I ever wash it off my name, you…

That's a weird response. Both form and content.

Anyway you are wrong, the tool calls are deterministic, generating a one-shot script isn't.

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

#314

Post by Uw7yTcf36gTc » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

codingisfreedom wrote: post #43

I’ve asked Astra to build me an app for a prototype I created quickly using Sonnet. It’s been 2 days and it made no real progress on the actual app. It created docs, scripts, workflows, and it’s doing a bunch of reviewing on every PR. I told it that I just need an MVP. I’m pretty sure an average senior engineer would have finished that task much quicker, and guaranteed with more readable, higher-quality code. Meanwhi…

Sonnet is not SOTA. Try with Fable or Astra.

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

#315

Post by sillyfluke » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:26 PM UTC

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…

>Claude was consistently doing database operations in a for loop, where it could use batch operations.

>The code in the end is better than a lot of the code I've seen humans write.

It's a little amusing to see those two sentences written back to back with no hint of irony to be frank.

By the way, why didn't the "Multiple agents going over the same problem catch a surprising amount of dumb stuff that would otherwise slip through" catch it?

Who knows how many skills you would have to have added if you actually reviewed the 400k codebase...But don't worry that's not what I am advocating. I myself would also latch onto any excuse that allows me to avoid the realization that I have to review 400k (or half that) lines of code, primary one being that I will always have a desperate paying customer that will always be grateful for anything I give them.

Which comes to your most valid advice which has nothing to do with AI (now that many devs have access to it):

> Work for business people who want fast results

This is what well oiled outsourve shops used to do and I must say it is no easy feat to be able to line up a constant stream of desperate businness people out of thin air, especially for your regular "I just want to code" engineer.

My guess is you're in the honeymoon phase with most of these people. The outsource shops that survived would fire the client that became more demanding and less grateful and move onto more freshly desperate client pastures. It is true that sales, self-promotion, and marketing are more important than ever now...

>Set up excellent testing.

Is this the part that you hand code or constantly review yourself? I guess not, since you would have explicitly mentioned something that important. I would caution you not to be surprised when no one believes you have excellent testing when you've unleashed multiple LLMs on it and are not reviewing code anymore.

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

#316

Post by petesergeant » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:30 PM UTC

Bluestein wrote: post #308

u8080 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. "I need tool objdump but pacman gcc failed because of no sudo password. Let me write compiler, binutils and disassembling framework"

... and meanwhile all this does is burn more tokens faster which is what providers want - they have no incentive to optimize for succinctness, elegance or compactness if they want you to spend more and more tokens.-

This only works when it's not easy to switch providers, and currently it is

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

#317

Post by cseleborg » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

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…

> they are very strongly tuned to value code that has no errors which can be picked up by linters or similar, while humans work the opposite way

This is a really valuable insight! It resonates well with my own experience revewing AI-authored code: I look hard at interfaces, architecture and performance, and merely glance over code that just "gets the job done", because if it works, I'm not worried about it. Now I can express that dichotomy much more clearly -- thank you!

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

#318

Post by JeremyNT » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

iforgotmypasswo wrote: post #279

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’ll try to explain how to do it correctly. I’m not selling anything. Seeing this as the top comment makes me a bit sad. 1. Learn about ports and adapters as an architecture pattern. Domain driven design and locality of reasoning are your new best friends. 2. Realize that AI can generate unlimited fake data almost immediately. So anything you can isolate can get a fake adapter and a real one. You can build and test a…

I honestly feel like you're making this sound more complicated than it needs to be. I get what I would describe as very good results from GPT 5.6 on my projects.

There are some methodologies that can improve things for me versus just YOLO'ing but even these are of marginal benefit:

* Have good requirements. Experience with a codebase and stakeholders helps a lot here.

* Correctly subdivide the task into chunks that won't blow context. You can write a big task and have an agent plan subtask delegation for you, but it's good to have some intuition of your own.

* Perform an automated code review. This is a no-brainer but it catches stuff.

* Make sure you understand the "big picture" stuff and stop caring about the little details. The agents will write unit tests, so you shouldn't have to care about reading every LOC, you can ask the agent to describe the architecture and flow instead.

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

#319

Post by csomar » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

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've got downvoted and flagged for saying similar. It's actually positive you are the top comment. There has been aggressive brigading around reddit/hackernews and also traditional media. These are malicious companies, so not out of their line. So far, AI seems to be useful only for programming. It's not clear it's useful for other professions. It can't even write straight without being recognizable from afar.

If AI is not even useful for programming, its value drops significantly. And some people seem to have dropped hundreds of billions on this.

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

#320

Post by jgwil2 » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

iforgotmypasswo wrote: post #279

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’ll try to explain how to do it correctly. I’m not selling anything. Seeing this as the top comment makes me a bit sad. 1. Learn about ports and adapters as an architecture pattern. Domain driven design and locality of reasoning are your new best friends. 2. Realize that AI can generate unlimited fake data almost immediately. So anything you can isolate can get a fake adapter and a real one. You can build and test a…

1. I'm not sure what you're advocating here that wasn't already a best practice in software engineering.

2. This is a real benefit.

3. Not sure I follow, can you expand on this?

4. You don't have to be a perfectionist but you should still understand what it's doing.

5. Yes, this is hard and related to item 4.

In any case, you're not really contradicting OC since their comment was specifically referring to "the people who say they no longer read any code," and that's not what you're advocating at all (see point 5).