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Coding agents have crossed a chasm

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Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#11

Post by kragen »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #7
muglug wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely — but I also think there’s a strong resistance to managers saying “AI is good, really”. The experience of long-term software engineers (e.g. antirez) who don’t have a horse in the AI race tends to line up much better with my own. Also really like this one: https://diwank.space/field-notes-from-shipping-real-code-wit...

Long-term software engineers do have an anti-horse in the AI race - a lot of us eventually could be replaced by a coding agent.

Most of us have been replaced by Microsoft Excel already though. Or by a compiler.

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#12

Post by catapart »

The chasm between "practical and useful utilities that have long term viability without a vast knowledge of the underlying mechanisms" and what AI-immersed devs consider "practical" and "useful" grows wider every time I check in.

Snarky and dismissive, sure. But the Wii wasn't a "1 to 1 motion matching" machine no matter how many people insisted it was. It was just "better than anything before had ever been". Which is not the same thing as "good". I'm not holding anything against anyone. The Wii was an incredible console, an LLMs are an incredible technology. I'd just like to read some thoughts on the tech from people who are more aligned with myself in their discernment. If, for nothing else, some variety.

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#13

Post by sasaf5 »

Up to now, my attempts at doing what the author claims to be possible ends up in a broken piece of code that the agent only makes worse when asked to debug, and finally it wont even compile. There seems to be a threshold of difficulty above which the agent will go bug-runaway. I honestly haven't seen this threshold going up. If anything, it seems to be saturating.

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#14

Post by nikcub »

muglug wrote: post #6
dps wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of the piece here :-). We are not building coding agents and focused on quite different stuff… I am just trying to share my personal experience as a software person!

Absolutely — but I also think there’s a strong resistance to managers saying “AI is good, really”. The experience of long-term software engineers (e.g. antirez) who don’t have a horse in the AI race tends to line up much better with my own. Also really like this one: https://diwank.space/field-notes-from-shipping-real-code-wit...

~~Counter~~ add to that - Armin Ronacher[0] (Flask, Sentry et al.), Charlie Marsh[1] (ruff, uv) and Jarred Sumner[2] (Bun) amongst others are tweeting extensively about their positive experiences with llm driven development.

My experience matches theirs - Claude Code is absolutely phenomenal, as is the Cursor tab completion model and the new memory feature.

[0] https://x.com/mitsuhiko

[1] https://x.com/charliermarsh

[2] https://x.com/jarredsumner

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#15

Post by dps »

satisfice wrote: post #9

Was this article written by AI? If I argue with it, am I arguing with a real person? Is it written by a corporate shill? Again, if I argue with it, am I talking to a wall? AI (and before that, corporations) makes skepticism more and more a basic survival skill. Since this is partly an experience report, it is only as trustworthy as its author, whoever that is. What is this person risking by writing it? The content se…

Author here… I wrote it, I used Claude for proofreading/editing as mentioned at the end. Anyway point is, real human here!

I do still read the code _except_ when I am consciously vibe coding a non production thing where I will know empirically that it worked or not by using it.

I’m definitely not using agents to do all my coding (as I hope is reasonably) clear from the post. But they have crossed this line from pointless to try to genuinely useful for many real world problems in just the last couple of months in my experience.

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#16

Post by muglug »

chrisweekly wrote: post #10
muglug wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely — but I also think there’s a strong resistance to managers saying “AI is good, really”. The experience of long-term software engineers (e.g. antirez) who don’t have a horse in the AI race tends to line up much better with my own. Also really like this one: https://diwank.space/field-notes-from-shipping-real-code-wit...

Not OP, and I don't have specific stake in any AI companies, but IMHO (as someone doing web-related things for a living (as a developer, team lead, "architect", product manager, consultant, and manager) since 1998, I think we pretty much all of us have skin in the game, whether or not we back a particular horse.

Really depends what you believe.

If you believe that agents will replace software developers like me in the near term, then you’d think I have a horse in this race.

But I don’t believe that.

My company pays for Cursor and so do I, and I’m using it with all the latest models. For my main job, writing code in a vast codebase with internal frameworks everywhere, it’s reasonably useless.

For much smaller codebases it’s much better, and it’s excellent for greenfield work.

But greenfield work isn’t where most of the money and time is spent.

There’s an assumption the tools will get much better. There are several ways they could be better (e.g. plugging into typecheckers to enable global reasoning about a codebase) but even then they’re not in replacement territory.

I listen to people like Yann LeCun and Demis Hassabis who believe further as-yet-unknown innovations are needed before we can escape a local maxima that we have with LLMs.

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#17

Post by imiric »

I'm personally still in the "smarter autocomplete" phase when it comes to LLMs, as I don't trust the vibe-coded "agents" and the outputs they produce to control my computer. But that aside, this part stood out to me:

> I don’t even look at the code anymore - I describe what I want to Claude Code, test the result, make some minor tweaks with the AI and if it’s not good enough, I start over with a slightly different initial prompt.

Honestly, does the author and anyone else using this workflow find this way of working enjoyable? To me programming is not entirely about the end goal. It's mostly the small bursts of dopamine whenever I solve a particular problem; whenever I refactor code to make it cleaner, simpler, and easier to read; whenever I write a test and see it pass, knowing that I'm building a safety net to safely refactor in the future. And so on.

Yes, the feeling of accomplishment after shipping a useful piece of software, be that a small script or a larger part of a system, is also great. But the small wins along the way are the things that make me want to keep programming.

This way of working where you don't even look at the code, but describe the system specs in prose, go back and forth with an extremely confident but highly error prone tool, manually test the result, and repeat this until you're satisfied... doesn't sound fun or interesting at all.

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#18

Post by reustle »

imiric wrote: post #17

I'm personally still in the "smarter autocomplete" phase when it comes to LLMs, as I don't trust the vibe-coded "agents" and the outputs they produce to control my computer. But that aside, this part stood out to me: > I don’t even look at the code anymore - I describe what I want to Claude Code, test the result, make some minor tweaks with the AI and if it’s not good enough, I start over with a slightly different in…

Just remember, you can continue to do artisanal programming as a hobby or for your own projects. But if you have an employer, they're paying you for functional and secure features, not lines of code.

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#19

Post by mogili »

muglug wrote: post #6
dps wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of the piece here :-). We are not building coding agents and focused on quite different stuff… I am just trying to share my personal experience as a software person!

Absolutely — but I also think there’s a strong resistance to managers saying “AI is good, really”. The experience of long-term software engineers (e.g. antirez) who don’t have a horse in the AI race tends to line up much better with my own. Also really like this one: https://diwank.space/field-notes-from-shipping-real-code-wit...

Long term software engineers very much have a horse in the AI race. It threatens their jobs and importance.

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#20

Post by mogili »

muglug wrote: post #16
chrisweekly wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, and I don't have specific stake in any AI companies, but IMHO (as someone doing web-related things for a living (as a developer, team lead, "architect", product manager, consultant, and manager) since 1998, I think we pretty much all of us have skin in the game, whether or not we back a particular horse.

Really depends what you believe. If you believe that agents will replace software developers like me in the near term, then you’d think I have a horse in this race. But I don’t believe that. My company pays for Cursor and so do I, and I’m using it with all the latest models. For my main job, writing code in a vast codebase with internal frameworks everywhere, it’s reasonably useless. For much smaller codebases it’s m…

You need to use better coding agents and workflows.
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