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The role of developer skills in agentic coding

martinfowler.com

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Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#111

Post by lioeters »

nukem222 wrote: post #92
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 If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago.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…

I agree with all of this. I want to offer a tiny bit more hope, though: > 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. I actually think the opposite: that within five years, we will be seeing AI one-shot software, not because LLMs will experience some kind of revolution in auditing output, but because we will move…

> we will move the goalposts to ensure the rough spots of AI are massaged out

Totally agree with this point. Software engineering will adapt to work better with LLMs. It will influence how we think about programming language design, as an interface to human readers/writers as well as for machines to "understand", generate, and refine.

There was a recent article about how LLMs will stifle innovation due to its cutoff point, where it's more productive using older or more mature frameworks and libraries whose documentation is part of the training data. I'm already seeing how this is affecting technical decisions at companies. But then again, it's similar to how such decisions are often made to maximize the labor pool, for example, choosing a more popular language due to availability of experts.

One thing I hope for is that we'll see more emphasis on thorough and precisely worded documentation. Similarly with API design and user interfaces in general, possibly leading to improvements in accessibility also.

Another aspect I think about is the recursive cycle of LLM-generated code and documentation being consumed by future LLMs, influencing what kinds of new frameworks and libraries may emerge that are particularly suited for this new kind of programming, purely AI or human/AI symbiosis.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#112

Post by kaoD »

aschearer wrote: post #40

I've been using Claude to help write a complex prototype for game dev. Overall it's been a big productivity boost. However as the project has grown Claude has gotten much worse. I'm nearing 15k lines and it's borderline more trouble than it's worth. Even when it was helpful, it needed a _lot_ of guidance from me. Almost more helpful as a "rubber ducky" and for the fact that it kept me from deadlocking on analysis. Th…

> Overall it's been a big productivity boost. However as the project has grown Claude has gotten much worse. I'm nearing 15k lines

I've read comments like this many times and I'm genuinely surprised at the coexistence of "productivity boost" and "15k lines".

Am I the only one that feels like 15k is a tiny project even in non-boilerplatey languages? That's not even past the prototyping stage of a small project.

Am I completely out of touch with a modern project's scale?

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#113

Post by kaoD »

ChromaticPanic wrote: post #108
danmur wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seems like you're dismissing the cost of artificially splitting what should be a monolith.

It outweighs the supposed productivity boost of LLMs by at least one order of magnitude if not more.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#114

Post by codr7 »

I don't get it, at all.

Why are experienced developers so enthusiastic about chaining themselves to such an obviously crappy and unfulfilling experience?

I like writing code and figuring stuff out, that's why I chose a career in software development in the first place.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#115

Post by beepbooptheory »

emseetech wrote: post #72
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…

#1 is going to be an issue until we have another breakthrough or genuinely innovative approach. We all know that 2 years is a lifetime in tech (for better or for worse), and we've all trained ourselves to keep up with a rapidly changing industry in a way that's more efficient than fully retraining a model with considerably more novel data. For instance, enough people have started to move away from React for more inno…

But doesnt this just ultimately "solve" itself? If everybody is just going to use LLMs like this, they will keep using React longer, and 2 years is not going to feel like that much of a lifetime anymore. How would, even, a developer inside their AI ecosystem like this even know or care about new frameworks or new ways to do things?

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#116

Post by ozim »

kristopolous wrote: post #68
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…

#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 feels like when I explain to a layperson cool dev tool like GIT.

They just roll eyes and continue to do copies of the files they work on.

I just roll eyes on that explanation because it exactly feels like additional work I don’t want to do. Doing my stuff the old way works right away without having to do some explanation tricks and setting up context for the tool I expect to do correct thing on the first go.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#117

Post by _acco »

codr7 wrote: post #114

I don't get it, at all. Why are experienced developers so enthusiastic about chaining themselves to such an obviously crappy and unfulfilling experience? I like writing code and figuring stuff out, that's why I chose a career in software development in the first place.

Why do we use hotkeys and snippets?

There is a lot of tedium in software development and these tools help alleviate it.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#118

Post by elif »

My solution to the authors babysitting problems is to close the iteration loop instead of embedding humans into it.

Agent generated broken code? An agent can discover that, provide feedback on the pull request, and close it, forcing the coding agent to respond to the feedback.

As long as you have 10 agents doing software engineering analysis for every 1 agent you have writing code, my suspicion is that a lot of this babysitting can be avoided.

At least theoretically.. I haven't got all of this infrastructure linked myself to try.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#119

Post by liveoneggs »

jb_briant wrote: post #74
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…

While you give your process feedback, here is my emotions related one. When I dev with LLM, I don't face my own limits in term of reasoning and architecturing, but I face the limit of the model to interpret prompts. Instead of trying to be a better engineer, I'm frustratingly prompting an unintelligent human-like interface. I'm not fuding LLM, I use it everyday, all the time. But it won't make me a better engineer. A…

it will make you a worse thinker

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#120

Post by aprilthird2021 »

infecto wrote: post #103
moqizhengz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I think your reply is a bit unfair. The first problem of the AI using outdated libraries sure it can be fixed if you are a competent developer who keeps up with industry standards. But if you need someone like that to guide an AI, then "agentic" coding loses a lot of its "agentic" ability which is what the article is talking about. If you need enthusiasts and experts to steer the AIs, they are a bit like "full self driving" where you are still asked to touch the steering wheel if it thinks you're not paying attention to the road.
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