Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
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Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
#2Has anyone ever seen an instance in which the automated "How" removal actually improves an article title on HN rather than just making them wrong?
(There probably are some. Most likely I notice the bad ones more than the good ones. But it does seem like I notice a lot of bad ones, and never any good ones.)
[EDITED to add:] For context, the actual article title begins "Superpowers: How I'm using ..." and it has been auto-rewritten to "Superpowers: I'm using ...", which completely changes what "Superpowers" is understood as applying to. (The actual intention: superpowers for LLM coding agents. The meaning after the change: LLM coding agents as superpowers for humans.)
Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
#3This is so interesting but it reads like satire. I'm sure folks who love persuading and teaching and marshalling groups are going to do very well in SWEng.
According to this, we'll all be reading the feelings journals of our LLM children and scolding them for cheating on our carefully crafted exams instead of, you know, making things. We'll read psychology books, apparently.
I like reading and tinkering directly. If this is real, the field is going to leave that behind.
Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
#4This is so interesting but it reads like satire. I'm sure folks who love persuading and teaching and marshalling groups are going to do very well in SWEng. According to this, we'll all be reading the feelings journals of our LLM children and scolding them for cheating on our carefully crafted exams instead of, you know, making things. We'll read psychology books, apparently. I like reading and tinkering directly. If…
We certainly will; they can’t replace humans in most language tasks without having a human like emotional model. I have a whole therapy set of agents to debug neurotic long lived agents with memory.
Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
#5take #73895 on how to fix ur prompt to make ur slop better.
Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
#6It's not a superpower if everybody has that same power.
Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
#7I often feel these types of blogposts would be more helpful if they demonstrated someone using the tools to build something non-trivial.
Is Claude really "learning new skills" when you feed it a book, or does it present it like that because you're prompting encourages that sort of response-behavior. I feel like it has to demo Claude with the new skills and Claude without.
Maybe I'm a curmudgeon but most of these types of blogs feel like marketing pieces with the important bit is that so much is left unsaid and not shown, that it comes off like a kid trying to hype up their own work without the benefit of nuance or depth.
Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
#8This is so interesting but it reads like satire. I'm sure folks who love persuading and teaching and marshalling groups are going to do very well in SWEng. According to this, we'll all be reading the feelings journals of our LLM children and scolding them for cheating on our carefully crafted exams instead of, you know, making things. We'll read psychology books, apparently. I like reading and tinkering directly. If…
We certainly will; they can’t replace humans in most language tasks without having a human like emotional model. I have a whole therapy set of agents to debug neurotic long lived agents with memory.
Ok, call me crazy, but I don't actually think there's any technical reason that a theoretical code generation robot needs emotions that are as fickle and difficult to manage as humans.
It's just that we designed this iteration of technology foundationally on people's fickle and emotional reddit posts among other things.
It's a designed-in limitation, and kind of a happy accident it's capable of writing code at all. And clearly carries forward a lot of baggage...
Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
#9I often feel these types of blogposts would be more helpful if they demonstrated someone using the tools to build something non-trivial. Is Claude really "learning new skills" when you feed it a book, or does it present it like that because you're prompting encourages that sort of response-behavior. I feel like it has to demo Claude with the new skills and Claude without. Maybe I'm a curmudgeon but most of these type…
Agreed. The methodology needed here is something like an A/B test, with quantifiable metrics that demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool. And to do it not just once, but many times under different scenarios so that it demonstrates statistical significance.
The most challenging part when working with coding agents is that they seem to do well initially on a small code base with low complexity. Once the codebase gets bigger with lots of non-trivial connections and patterns, they almost always experience tunnel vision when asked to do anything non-trivial, leading to increased tech debt.
Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
#10Has anyone ever seen an instance in which the automated "How" removal actually improves an article title on HN rather than just making them wrong? (There probably are some. Most likely I notice the bad ones more than the good ones. But it does seem like I notice a lot of bad ones, and never any good ones.) [EDITED to add:] For context, the actual article title begins "Superpowers: How I'm using ..." and it has been a…
I agree, I'm sure I've seen instances of where it's worked but the problem is that when it messes it up it's much more annoying than any benefit it brings when it does work. Some of us don't want to be reminded that tech is full of hubris, overconfidence, poor judgment, and failure about what can/should be abstracted and automated.