Live data from Hacker News

Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

blog.exe.dev

101–110 of 110 posts

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you can be confident the things "you" built won't crash if you're not at least scanning the code that you're generating.

human written code also has bugs and crashes…

Then why be confident the LLM code won't crash

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get more confidence by asking the LLM about when the architecture would be appropriate than by trying to intuit it yourself. The LLM is trained on so many more architectures and stories of how they panned out than you are. The skill is really in manually testing before handoff.

I still get occasional hallucinations, wrong answers, and entirely unnecessary change proposals from LLMs. An LLM being confident in its own work does not make me confident in it.

You get that from humans too.

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something devs don’t give enough credit. You may think you’re just promoting, but ask someone outside the field to prompt their way to a feature and you will see very clearly what your experience is bringing to the table.

Yeah, but train them for a month on how to get the AI to help them prompt, and they'll do fine. AIs are extremely effective at letting you offload skill, you just need to know how to ask. This should surprise nobody, since this is what they were and built for. I genuinely don't think you need much training for creating code any more. The skill can be offloaded.

I had a conversation with someone about this the other day where they asked what AI was useful for, and I said programming, and they asked what programming was, and I eventually stumbled into "it's how you make apps".

I'm not worried for my career.

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#106
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but train them for a month on how to get the AI to help them prompt, and they'll do fine. AIs are extremely effective at letting you offload skill, you just need to know how to ask. This should surprise nobody, since this is what they were and built for. I genuinely don't think you need much training for creating code any more. The skill can be offloaded.

I had a conversation with someone about this the other day where they asked what AI was useful for, and I said programming, and they asked what programming was, and I eventually stumbled into "it's how you make apps". I'm not worried for my career.

Fascinating. What an extreme outlier. Where did you find them? Did you also have to explain what an app was?

Anyways, if being more capable than them is the bar you think you need to clear, I suppose you'll be fine.

I still stand by my statement: there's no deep knowledge needed to deliver most of the software we need today, just some iteration on prompts. And the AI is getting better pretty quickly. You need to be able to explain what you want, why the AI got it wrong, and paste the error you see. It takes some focused training, but so does being a line chef at a restaurant.

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something devs don’t give enough credit. You may think you’re just promoting, but ask someone outside the field to prompt their way to a feature and you will see very clearly what your experience is bringing to the table.

Yeah, but train them for a month on how to get the AI to help them prompt, and they'll do fine. AIs are extremely effective at letting you offload skill, you just need to know how to ask. This should surprise nobody, since this is what they were and built for. I genuinely don't think you need much training for creating code any more. The skill can be offloaded.

I don't disagree in principle, but there's got to be a ceiling at some complexity. Teach them to prompt their way into a Twitter clone in a month (or less), sure. Teach them to prompt their way into a Bun rewrite in Rust in a month...well, there are apparently some people who need your help right now ;)

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still get occasional hallucinations, wrong answers, and entirely unnecessary change proposals from LLMs. An LLM being confident in its own work does not make me confident in it.

You get that from humans too.

No shit, that's why we review code...

You're not making a point

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get that from humans too.

No shit, that's why we review code... You're not making a point

And LLMs are already better code reviewers than humans are; take a look at the bugs found in the Linux kernel.

Re: Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

#110

How do people read these types of post with this AI flair, I couldn't read more than a couple sentences

It is such an incredibly disrespectful way of communication. If the author can't bother to write the article himself why should the thousands of people who come across this post bother to read it? How do I know where the author's own thoughts end and AI's assumptions about his thoughts begin? Then again people typically don't read past the title so I suppose it doesn't matter what the content of the article is, as lo…

I couldn't agree more.

Its like I'm reading a claude chat response but worse in every way. Its such quantity over quality nonsense. On the off chance it isn't obvious from the get go and you learn its AI written halfway through you feel taken advantage of as you assumed you were reading someone's actual thoughts. But instead you spent several minutes reading something thats just some generic LLM output.

Post reply on HN