Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The role of developer skills in agentic coding

martinfowler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 204 posts

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#101

Post by jvanderbot »

aulin wrote: post #73
jvanderbot wrote: post #5

I'm surprised to not see an obvious one (for me): Use AI around the periphery. There's very often a heap of dev tools, introspection, logging, conversion, etc tools that need to be build and maintained. I've had a lot of luck using agents to make and fix these. For example a tool that collates data and logs in a bespoke planning system. It is a lot of generated boilerplate off the critical path to build these tools a…

In my every day experience that's pretty risky. The periphery as you call it is often an area where you lack the expertise to spot and correct AI mistakes. I am thinking about build systems and shell scripts. I see people everyday going to AI before even looking at the docs and invariably failing with non-existent command line options, or worst options that break things in very subtle ways. Same people that when you…

You're wrong. I have all the expertise but none of the time to generate 100s of lines of boilerplate API calls to get the data together, and no interest in formatting it correctly for consumption, let alone doing so state fully to allow interaction. These are trivial problems to solve that are highly tedious and do not affect whatsoever the business at hand. Perfect drudgery for automation, and just scanning the result is easy to verify the output or code.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#102

Post by dagw »

rixed wrote: post #69
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #36

I've been playing around with vibe coding and I think a lot of the issues brought up could be fixed by an architecture abstraction layer that does not exist today. My idea would be something like an architecture-graph (Archigraph working title) that would recursively describe how an application works or should work. Then when an agentic coder is doing a task they can easily see the bigger picture of how an applicatio…

That abstraction layer that does not exist today looks a lot like the many high level architectural design languages that were hot in the 90s. Never heard of UML?

I bet there is an LLM based version of Rational Rose currently under development somewhere.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#103

Post by infecto »

moqizhengz wrote: post #88
kristopolous wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 has an easy fix. Clone the dependency you want to use in the directory of your code. Instruct it to go into the directory and look at that code in order to complete task X: "I've got a new directory xyz, in it contains a library to do feature abc. I'll need to include it here to do A to function B and so on" The weird version mixing bug will disappear. If it's closed source, then just do the documentation. You nee…

This is a very typical reply when we see someone pointing out the flaws of AI coding tools. "You are using it wrong, AI can do everything if you properly prompt it" Yes, it can write everything if I provide enough context, but it ain't 'Intelligence' if context ~= output. The point here is providing enough context itself is challenging and requires expertise, this makes AI ides unusable for many scenarios.

This is a very typical reply when we see someone excited about AI and then a luddite needs to come along and tell them why they should not be so excited and helpful.

I mostly jest but your comment comes off quite unhelpful and negative. The person you replied to wasn’t blaming the parent comment, just offering helpful tips. I agree that today’s AI tools aren’t perfect, but I also think it’s important for developers to invest time refining their toolset. It’s no different from customizing IDE shortcuts. These tools will improve, but if devs aren’t willing to tinker with what they use, what’s the point?

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#104

Post by ikerino »

re-thc wrote: post #96
ikerino wrote: post #12

I use Cursor for most of my development these days. This article aligns pretty closely with my experiences. A few additional observations: 1. Anecdotally, AI agents feel stuck somewhere circa ~2021. If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago. This is incredibly frustrating to watch and correct for. Providing explicit instructions for which pac…

> Current environment feels like the self-driving car hype cycle. Is that really hype? I mean there companies or person(s) hyping it up, but there is also Waymo and Pingshan (Baidu) for example actually rolling it out. It's a lot less hype than AI coding. > Anecdotally, AI agents feel stuck somewhere circa ~2021. That's only part of the problem. It's also stuck or dead set on certain frameworks / libraries where it h…

> Is that really hype?

I'm thinking back to various promises self-driving would be widespread by 2016. These set a certain expectation for how our roads would look that I don't think has been realized a decade later (even as I've ridden in Waymos/FSD Teslas.)

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#105

Post by trash_cat »

achierius wrote: post #64
owebmaster wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't learn but agents do. You just need to insert that new knowledge in the prompt.

Agents are still LLMs. LLMs also have prompts. There's no difference!

Agents HAVE Models. There is a big difference if you give a model access to tools and perhaps some form of memory.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#106

Post by aulin »

jvanderbot wrote: post #101
aulin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my every day experience that's pretty risky. The periphery as you call it is often an area where you lack the expertise to spot and correct AI mistakes. I am thinking about build systems and shell scripts. I see people everyday going to AI before even looking at the docs and invariably failing with non-existent command line options, or worst options that break things in very subtle ways. Same people that when you…

You're wrong. I have all the expertise but none of the time to generate 100s of lines of boilerplate API calls to get the data together, and no interest in formatting it correctly for consumption, let alone doing so state fully to allow interaction. These are trivial problems to solve that are highly tedious and do not affect whatsoever the business at hand. Perfect drudgery for automation, and just scanning the resu…

I am not wrong. You simply are not the kind of developer I am thinking about. And believe me the other kind is way more represented.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#107

Post by impjohn »

petesergeant wrote: post #95
ikerino wrote: post #12

I use Cursor for most of my development these days. This article aligns pretty closely with my experiences. A few additional observations: 1. Anecdotally, AI agents feel stuck somewhere circa ~2021. If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago. This is incredibly frustrating to watch and correct for. Providing explicit instructions for which pac…

> Spot on. Current environment feels like the self-driving car hype cycle. There have been a lot of bold promises (and genuine advances), but I don't see a world in the next 5 years where AI writes useful software by itself. My worry is that we get an overnight sea-change like 4o image generation. The current tools aren't good enough for anything other than one-shotting, and then suddenly overnight, they're good enou…

Hm. The 'prompt obedience' was definitely a huge step up, but there's a huge number of acceptable results to an image generation prompt, while for coding usually there a handful, many times just one right solution. So I don't think this parallel here is telling

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#108

Post by ChromaticPanic »

danmur wrote: post #97
AndyNemmity wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just split the tasks, and have different projects only house a portion of the code?

Why dumb down your work worse because the machine can't understand it?

Seems like the code is designed poorly if it can't be worked on in small chunks

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#110

Post by impjohn »

materielle wrote: post #37
CuriouslyC wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but unless you count framework bootstraps for models and configs and stuff like that as "coding" nobody is legitimately writing 7500 lines in a day. At my most productive, powering through real problems, debugging issues and making stuff solid, I've hit ~3500 with marathon code sessions and ChatGPT. I've seen industry leaders and competitive coders in action, and none of them were significantly faster - any…

Everyone is missing the point. Fine, maybe the math is off and it took 3 days instead of 2. The issue is that Cursor tends to be demoed for incredibly small, green, and simple projects. Most of us are working on codebases with at least over 10 million lines. I would love an AI agent that can massive infrastructure migrations with only a bit of oversight. Didn’t Shopify do something like that recently? I think this is…

I've been personally surprised that this doesn't come up more often. Most mature codebases span a decade or more, and especially in the web, there's so many layers of evolving technologies that were introduced during this time, resulting in complex geological layers forming in the codebase as the patterns evolved. That is not only a lot of lines of code, but a lot of nuance as well. Even a basic problem like routing can make these AIs fall flat on their face because of the sheer context and complexities involved
Post reply on HN