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Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

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Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#11

Post by bluefirebrand »

mark242 wrote: post #7
palmotea wrote: post #2

> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers.... > In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of…

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

> the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions

Who are you to tell anyone what the fun "should" be?

Personally, I find writing code very fun, because building the solution is also very gratifying.

Besides which, in my experience until you actually write the code you haven't proven that you solved anything. It's so easy to think you have solved a problem when you haven't, but you won't figure that out until you actually try to apply your solution

> The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

This can be solved with simple linters, no need for LLMs

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#13

Post by chris_money202 »

mark242 wrote: post #7
palmotea wrote: post #2

> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers.... > In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of…

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

Exactly, the fun part is when the code works and does what you wanted it to do. Writing code itself is not fun. People forget this because they get small wins / dopamine hits along the way, a clever function, an elegant few lines of code, a bug fix, but the majority of that time coding is just a grind until the end where you get the big dopamine hit.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#14

Post by palmotea »

mark242 wrote: post #7
palmotea wrote: post #2

> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers.... > In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of…

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

>> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job.

> Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions.

Aren't the coding agents supposed to be doing that too? You give them the problem, they code up a solution, then the engineer is left with the review it to see if it's good enough.

> The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

That's like such a minor and easy-to-do thing that I'm surprised you're even bringing it up.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#15

Post by ineedasername »

There were no uncomfortable truths there about code agents, save one of the 4 points which was that maybe they sometimes get prompt injected if you let them search for things online and don't pay attention to where they search and the code they write. That's not an uncomfortable truth in the normal sense of "I know you don't want to admit this but..." and more just the thing that, if you didn't know it already 8 months ago, you certainly should by now.

The other truths that were not about coding agents:

--Skill Atrophy. (Use it or lose it-- another thing we already know)

--The economics of serving code agents at scale (Ungrounded in actual numbers, only OpenAI's miscellaneous statements and annecdotes. Actual cost of running code agents: last gen's mid-tier gaming gpu's will get you reasonably close to Claude Sonnet if you put just a little time in to an agent harness, and its getting cheaper and cheaper for better and better. So, at scale, with real sysadmins doing the hard engineering to eek out every last bit of performance-- well, infra needed for serving these isn't the cost center)

--Copyright. (This passed on the same bad read of a court ruling half the press has been doing for a few years now. TLDR: The Thaler vs. Perlmutter case, which said nothing about output not being protected by copyright. It denied Thaler's attempt to register *the AI* as the owner of the copyright)

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#16

Post by autoexec »

mark242 wrote: post #7
palmotea wrote: post #2

> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers.... > In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of…

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

Companies aren't investing in AI because they want to solve the problem of semicolon placement. They want AI to solve problems and come up with solutions. Then they want to fire most of their programmers and force the rest to do nothing but check over and fix the slop their marketing departments are churning out.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#17

Post by abletonlive »

palmotea wrote: post #9
abletonlive wrote: post #4

These opinions about what is going on w/ LLM development always stop short at first order effects and fail to account for second/third order effects. > Skill atrophy If LLMs are so good that you no longer have use for the skill, why do we care about skill atrophy? That skill isn't that useful to most people. There are so many examples of this in human history where it was completely fine and we went on to do higher o…

> If LLMs are so good that you no longer have use for the skill, why do we care about skill atrophy? That skill isn't that useful to most people. There are so many examples of this in human history where it was completely fine and we went on to do higher order things that were more useful. Because the LLMs actually aren't that good, so humans are expected to monitor them using the skills they no longer have the oppor…

> Because the LLMs actually aren't that good, so humans are expected to monitor them using the skills they no longer have the opportunity to develop and maintain

If humans are expected to monitor them using the skill then obviously they are still practicing the skill and the skill is developed and maintained. Help me understand why it is so difficult for everybody with this opinion to take a another step into their premise?

> humans are bad at continuously monitoring for occasional errors

Let's assume this is true for sake of discussion: That's the job, pre-llm or not. Air traffic control? occasional errors. Software bugs? occasional errors. Department of homeland security? occasional threats

If it's hard and required that we handle the issue, then it's a skill that people will naturally exercise and the skill therefore won't atrophy.

If your argument was true we'd have swarms of people doing accounting by hand instead of using accounting tools because you're worried that the accountants will atrophy their ability to audit the output of the tools.

That's not how it works in the real world and we have plenty of examples of it...

But sure, if your argument simply boils down to "this time...it's different" like the author is arguing, then let's leave it at that. There's no value in discussing it further just like there was no value in the original post. It was just mindless slop to promote "standup for me" which is also something that falls under the category of: "things that are no longer relevant because of llms"

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#18

Post by lelanthran »

mark242 wrote: post #7
palmotea wrote: post #2

> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers.... > In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of…

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

> Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions.

You don't need to be a software engineer to do that.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#19

Post by mark242 »

lelanthran wrote: post #18
mark242 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

> Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. You don't need to be a software engineer to do that.

Except you kind of do -- understanding data structures, understanding software engineering concepts, all of the things that you learn as a good engineer, those are ways that you help guide the LLM in its work.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#20

Post by [deleted] »

jonah wrote: post #5
palmotea wrote: post #2

> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers.... > In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of…

Sounds a lot like "self-driving" cars - "they are good enough 95%+ of the time, you’re not going to pay as much attention as you should". Same thing happens here, you get complacent and miss critical failures or problems. It's also similar in that it "take[s away] many of the fun parts". When I can focus on simply driving it can be engaging and enjoyable - no matter the road or traffic or whatever.

[deleted]
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