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Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

blog.alaindichiappari.dev

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Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#111

Post by normie3000 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #98
alainrk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point. My concern is more about the tedious aspects. You could argue that tedium is part of what makes the craft valuable, and there's truth to that. But it comes down to trade-offs, what could I accomplish with that saved time, and would I get more value from those other pursuits?

I honestly think the stuff AI is really good at is the stuff around the programming that keeps you from the actual programming. Take a tool like Gradle. Bigger pain in the ass using an actual cactus as a desk chair. It has a staggering rate of syntax and feature churn with every version upgrade, sprawling documentation that is clearly written by space aliens, every problem is completely ungoogleable as every single r…

I'm glad to hear the gradle experience hasn't changed in the decade since I started avoiding it.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#112

Post by tsunagatta »

toddmorey wrote: post #110
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103

I would think that frameworks make more sense than ever with LLMs. The benefits of frameworks were always having something well tested that you knew would do the job, and that after a bit of use you'd be familiar with, and the same still stands. LLMs still aren't AGI, and they learn by example. The reason they are decent at writing React code is because they were trained on a lot of it, and they are going to be bette…

It’s fun to ask the models their input. I was working on diagrams and was sure Claude would want some python / js framework to handle layout and nodes and connections. It said “honestly I find it easiest to just write the svg code directly”.

That is fun, but it doesn’t mean that the model finds it easier or will actually work better that way, that just means that in its training data many people said something like “honestly I find it easiest to just write the svg code directly” in response to similar questions

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#113

Post by normie3000 »

milowata wrote: post #66
alainrk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point. My concern is more about the tedious aspects. You could argue that tedium is part of what makes the craft valuable, and there's truth to that. But it comes down to trade-offs, what could I accomplish with that saved time, and would I get more value from those other pursuits?

I had this moment recently with implementing facebook oauth. I don’t need to spend mental cycles figuring that out, doing the back and forth with their API, pulling my hair out at their docs, etc. I just want it to work and build my app. AI just did that part for me and could move on.

Integrating auth code is probably a good example of code you want to understand, rather than just seeing that it appears to work.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#114

Post by jmull »

> Since [a few months ago], things have dramatically changed...

It's not like we haven't heard that one before. Things have changed, but it's been a steady march. The sudden magic shift, at a different point for everyone, is in the individual mind.

Regarding the epiphany... since people have been heavily overusing frameworks -- making their projects more complex, more brittle, more disorganized, more difficult to maintain -- for non-technical reasons, people aren't going to stop just because LLMs make them less necessary; The overuse wasn't necessary in the first place.

Perhaps unnecessary framework usage will drop, though, as the new hype replaces the old hype. But projects won't be better designed, better organized, better through-through.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#115

Post by ipsento606 »

> Software engineers are scared of designing things themselves.

When I use a framework, it's because I believe that the designers of that framework are i) probably better at software engineering than I am, and ii) have encountered all sorts of problems and scaling issues (both in terms of usage and actual codebase size) that I haven't encountered yet, and have designed the framework to ameliorate those problems.

Those beliefs aren't always true, but they're often true.

Starting projects is easy. You often don't get to the really thorny problems until you're already operating at scale and under considerable pressure. Trying to rearchitect things at that point sucks.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#116

Post by kmac_ »

abcde666777 wrote: post #25

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing. 'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his s…

Current models won't write anything new, they are "just" great at matching, qualifying, and copying patterns. They bring a lot of value right now, but there is no creativity.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#117

Post by hakunin »

ctoth wrote: post #107
hakunin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the points the "other side" makes, this one seems the most incoherent. Code is deterministic, AI isn’t. We don’t have to look at assembly, because a compiler produces the same result every time. If you only understand the code by talking to AI, you would’ve been able to ask AI “how do we do a business feature” and ai would spit out a detailed answer, for a codebase that just says “pretend there is a codebase h…

> other side??? > We don’t have to look at assembly, because a compiler produces the same result every time. This is technically true in the narrowest possible sense and practically misleading in almost every way that matters. Anyone who's had a bug that only manifests at -O2, or fought undefined behavior in C that two compilers handle differently, or watched MSVC and GCC produce meaningfully different codegen from i…

You just described deterministic behavior. Bugs are also deterministic. You don’t get different bugs every time you compile the same code the same way. With LLMs you do.

Re: “other side” - I’m quoting the grandparent’s framing.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#118

Post by simonw »

abcde666777 wrote: post #25

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing. 'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his s…

Have you really never found writing code painful?

CI is failing. It passed yesterday. Is there a flaky API being called somewhere? Did a recent commit introduce a breaking change? Maybe one of my third-party dependencies shipped a breaking change?

I was going to work on new code, but now I have to spend between 5 minutes and an hour+ - impossible to predict - solving this new frustration that just cropped up.

I love building things and solving new problems. I'd rather not have that time stolen from me by tedious issues like this... especially now I can outsource the CI debugging to an agent.

These days if something flakes out in CI I point Claude Code at it and 90% of the time I have the solution a couple of minutes later.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#119

Post by throwaw12 »

capyba wrote: post #29
abcde666777 wrote: post #25

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing. 'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his s…

Your last sentence describes my thoughts exactly. I try to incorporate Claude into my workflow, just to see what it can do, and the best I’ve ended up with is - if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better. Even just some AI-assisted development in the trickier parts of my code bases completely robs me o…

skill issue.

sorry for being blunt, but if you have tried once, twice and came to this conclusion, it is definitely a skill issue, I never got comfortable by writing 3 lines of Java, Python or Go or any other language, it took me hundreds of hours spent doing non-sense, failing miserably and finding out that I was building things which already exists in std lib.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#120

Post by danny_codes »

ctoth wrote: post #107
hakunin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the points the "other side" makes, this one seems the most incoherent. Code is deterministic, AI isn’t. We don’t have to look at assembly, because a compiler produces the same result every time. If you only understand the code by talking to AI, you would’ve been able to ask AI “how do we do a business feature” and ai would spit out a detailed answer, for a codebase that just says “pretend there is a codebase h…

> other side??? > We don’t have to look at assembly, because a compiler produces the same result every time. This is technically true in the narrowest possible sense and practically misleading in almost every way that matters. Anyone who's had a bug that only manifests at -O2, or fought undefined behavior in C that two compilers handle differently, or watched MSVC and GCC produce meaningfully different codegen from i…

GCC is, I imagine, several orders of magnitude mor deterministic than an LLM.
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