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Agentic Coding Is a Trap

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Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#101

Post by WD-42 »

ryandrake wrote: post #86
keyle wrote: post #79

As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". I really don't like these meetings where you're dragged in in the middle of them without any clue. The questions came flying in fast, without any introduction, and this was about an external integration out of a dozen. They have their own lingo, different from ours, to make the situation worse. I had a _very…

What kind of place do you work where you get dragged into a meeting halfway through and then are peppered with technical questions without context, that you're expected to answer on the spot? Please let us know because I'm sure a lot of us want to avoid such a place. "I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.

I don’t think it was made clear: the questions were about the code op “wrote” but they used a llm so couldn’t remember any of it. Probably got there from a git blame. This happens.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#102

Post by phendrenad2 »

> This is the sentiment being hyped up around the industry currently: traditional coding is all but dead, and Spec Driven Development (SDD) is the future. You generate a plan, and disconnect from writing any code

Agentic agile > agentic waterfall (at least for now)

Don't give the AI a spec, work with it every step of the way.

> pulls the slot machine lever over and over (link to "One More Prompt: The Dopamine Trap of Agentic Coding")

I'm sure the first cave-person to discover how to make fire was equally "addicted" to making fires. That doesn't really say anything about the underlying technology.

> An increase in the complexity of the surrounding systems to mitigate the increased ambiguity of AI's non-determinism

I don't know what this means, exactly. Anyone have any ideas?

> Atrophying skills for a wide swath of the population

This is very real and something we're going to have to contend with. Software can't really become less complex, and there's a minimum amount of knowledge you need, with or without AIs there to help you. We may need specialized training academies for developers where they spend a few years without AI to learn to program, and then are given a few years of AI programming.

> Vendor lock-in for individuals and entire teams

This isn't really a big program, you can always switch AI providers if there's frequent downtime.

> only a skilled developer who's thinking critically, and comfortable operating at the architectural level, can spot issues in the thousands of lines of generated code, before they become a problem

Agreed...

> Yet, in an ironic twist of fate, it's the individual's critical thinking skills and cognitive clarity that AI tooling has now been proven to impact negatively.

...well, yes and no. AI tooling can help you _reduce_ cognitive debt. Picture this: There is one senior developer (Person A) on the team who understands Service X. Your other developers could schedule time with Person A to get an understanding. Or, they could ask the AI to analyze the project and explain it to them. This scales much better, and if Person A is a poor communicator (let's face it, many senior engineers are), it might be the only working option.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#103

Post by ray_v »

jmuguy wrote: post #53
fnordpiglet wrote: post #51

Interestingly I’ve learned more about languages and systems and tools I use in the last few years working with agentic coding than I did in 35 years of artisanal programming. I am still vastly superior at making decisions about systems and techniques and approaches than the agentic tools, but they are like a really really well read intern who knows a great deal of detail about errata but have very little experience.…

This post does not make the claim that "you should know everything about everything you work on" - its making the claim that writing code and being able to read code effectively are intrinsically linked.

I wonder if it's not so much the coding that people don't want to write, but it's more about the weight of all the orchestration, data engineering and research that has to be done (or, understood in the first place) to get anything off the ground these days. It feels off the charts complicated, and of course is now shifting rapidly.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#104

Post by luxuryballs »

If you just scale it back a little bit so you’re having the agent write methods, services, tests, scaffolding, etc, and keep it concise, you can get a lot of productivity gain without giving up your control of the codebase. It feels like some developers are leaning too far into the “vibe coding” but I was getting a lot of accelerated development years ago when I was still just asking the chat window for code, there is def a sort of laziness trap.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#105

Post by marcosdumay »

everyone wrote: post #72

Im seeing the word "agentic" a lot here. Is there a difference between "Agentic Coding" and "I put prompt into gpt or claude and pasted code into my file" ?

Agents will read all (or some, if you set this way) your code and apply the generated changes directly into as many files as needed. They can also get information from other services you have locally or run shell commands (like tests, or git) and use the result if you set them this way.

It's quite different.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#106

Post by Supermancho »

everyone wrote: post #72

Im seeing the word "agentic" a lot here. Is there a difference between "Agentic Coding" and "I put prompt into gpt or claude and pasted code into my file" ?

It's a lot different than interacting with the webpage prompts. Running a client locally that can interact with your IDE, execute your test and build processes, interact with version control, write the files it suggests as a PR, and has context memory changes how you code, for sure. If you've used an LLM with context memory (eg Chatgpt plus) where it can infer things you mention or derive intent from previous conversations from weeks ago, it's gets eerie.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#107

Post by [deleted] »

kelnos wrote: post #64
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #9

The thing is the code quality is still ultimately up to you Nothing stopping you from iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write

IME, it's faster and less frustrating to just write the code myself, if the goal is to get code to my quality standards.

[deleted]

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#108

Post by ajam1507 »

ryandrake wrote: post #100

Using AI to go faster is optimizing the wrong thing. At every place I've worked, the "code writing" part takes the least amount of time, compared to all the other things you need to do in order to implement a feature. Let's examine a feature that takes a day to code: First, you've got to plan everything, using whatever Agile or Waterfall planning ritual your company uses, get the task breakdown, file the JIRA tickets…

It very much depends on what kind of company you work for. You could never run a startup like this, for example.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#109

Post by ex-aws-dude »

ryandrake wrote: post #100

Using AI to go faster is optimizing the wrong thing. At every place I've worked, the "code writing" part takes the least amount of time, compared to all the other things you need to do in order to implement a feature. Let's examine a feature that takes a day to code: First, you've got to plan everything, using whatever Agile or Waterfall planning ritual your company uses, get the task breakdown, file the JIRA tickets…

Not every company works like that

Big tech has a lot of wankery like that but smaller companies can be fast and scrappy

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#110

Post by jbethune »

He's speaking facts. I have had the same concern about excessive cognitive offloading. As others have noted in the comments, AI tools when used correctly, can actually make us smarter and help us learn faster. But that requires a very particular usage pattern that is different from what I see with all the vibe coding going on these days.

I created a project called Ninchi to force myself to read my code and understand it. Recently I began also sharing it to see if there may be a larger need/opportunity. It's a small effort. We need to make a variety of efforts I think to encourage responsible AI usage before we end up drowning in slop.

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