I love being able to put my brain cells at lean, coq, haskell. All the fun stuff. And have my money job taken care of mostly with agents.
I’m spending months coding the old way
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Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#12You should do what you want, and as a break it’s fine. But IMO right now the most leverage for most people is learning how to effectively manage agents. It’s really hard. Not many are truly good with it. It will be relevant for a long time.
> It will be relevant for a long time.
Citation needed.
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#13[stub for offtopicness] (I swapped the title for the subtitle earlier because I thought it was more informative. What I missed was the flamebaity effect that "the old way" would have. Obvious in hindsight!)
Remember the old days of our youth, i.e. last week Monday, when we still wrote code by hand?
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#14You should do what you want, and as a break it’s fine. But IMO right now the most leverage for most people is learning how to effectively manage agents. It’s really hard. Not many are truly good with it. It will be relevant for a long time.
The agents are already learning to manage agents, if it’s relevancy you’re looking for you might want to take up plumbing instead.
Not sure what you are using, but that’s easier said than done. I just set up an agent to ensure that my other agent would follow my coding guidelines by using hooks. The coding agent responded by switching to editing with `sed`, etc. to circumvent the hooks.
Claude Opus is going to give zero fucks about your attempts to manage it.
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#15You should do what you want, and as a break it’s fine. But IMO right now the most leverage for most people is learning how to effectively manage agents. It’s really hard. Not many are truly good with it. It will be relevant for a long time.
> It will be relevant for a long time.
Why would you think that? The landscape is fast-moving. Prompting tricks and "AI skills" of yesterday are already dated and sometimes actively counterproductive. The explicit goal of the companies working on the tech is to lower the barriers to entry and make it easier to use, building harnesses and doing refinement that align LLMs to an intuitive mode of interaction.
Do you think they'll fail? Do you think we've plateaued in terms of what using a computer looks like and your learnings for wrangling the agents of this year will be relevant for whatever the new hotness is next year? It's a strong claim that demands similarly strong argument to support.
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#16[stub for offtopicness] (I swapped the title for the subtitle earlier because I thought it was more informative. What I missed was the flamebaity effect that "the old way" would have. Obvious in hindsight!)
Remember the old days of our youth, i.e. last week Monday, when we still wrote code by hand ?
I can't tell if OP is satire... I've just seen so many unhiged takes that this article reads completely in line with the discourse...
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#17I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way.
What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and just let LLMs push straight to main for everything and they get hired as senior engineers.
It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.
If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code.
But also, I feel this way about the industry long before LLMs. If you are not confident enough to run Linux on the computer in front of you, no senior sysadmin will hire you to go near their production systems.
Job one of everyone I mentor is to build Linux from scratch, and if you want an LLM build all the tools to run one locally for yourself. You will be way more capable and employable if you do not skip straight to using magic you do not understand.
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#18I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way. What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and jus…
> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code.
So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers?
Serious question.
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#19You should do what you want, and as a break it’s fine. But IMO right now the most leverage for most people is learning how to effectively manage agents. It’s really hard. Not many are truly good with it. It will be relevant for a long time.
The agents are already learning to manage agents, if it’s relevancy you’re looking for you might want to take up plumbing instead.
this is exactly right, I don't manage agents anymore (and have spent countless hours before learning how to do so, now this is a skill like my microsoft access skills (which were amazing back in the day...)
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#20You should do what you want, and as a break it’s fine. But IMO right now the most leverage for most people is learning how to effectively manage agents. It’s really hard. Not many are truly good with it. It will be relevant for a long time.
> It’s really hard How? I just open multiple terminal panes, use git tree, and then basically it’s good old software dev practices. What am I missing?
You're probably significantly underselling the value of your own "good old software dev practices."