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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

#121

Post by Nemi »

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 If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago.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 don’t do much development anymore, but this is always how I felt when ORM’s like Hibernate came out. At first they were amazing and were used for everything. Eventually it became obvious that as the complexity of the code went up linearly, the difficulty of troubleshooting and optimizing the code went up exponentially.

I learned to only used ORM’s for basic stuff, which they are very much useful, but when things got a little bit complicated to drop back to hand coding SQL.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#122

Post by aprilthird2021 »

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 If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago.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…

> A few months ago, I used Claude to "one-shot" a genuinely useful web app. It was fully featured and surprisingly polished. Alone, I think it would've taken a couple weeks or weekends to build. But, when I asked it to update the favicon using a provided file, it spun uselessly for an hour (I eventually did it myself in a couple minutes).

This reminds me of when cross-platform was becoming big for mobile apps and all of us new app developers would put up templates on GitHub which gave a great base to start on, but you really quickly realized you'd have to change a lot of it for your use case anyways.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#123

Post by aprilthird2021 »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #115
emseetech wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#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?

No because big companies see far more value from actually innovating and producing better technology (see Bytedance with their new cross-platform mobile framework Lynx) that speeds up things and provides better User Experience at their scale than they save in developer salaries by just using what an AI is most familiar with

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#124

Post by aprilthird2021 »

lioeters wrote: post #111
nukem222 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> One thing I hope for is that we'll see more emphasis on thorough and precisely worded documentation.

Being on this planet long enough, I've learned this won't happen and in fact the quality of such will degrade making the AI using them degrade and we'll all have to just accept these flaws and work around them like so many myriad technical flaws in our current systems today

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#125

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#126

Post by owebmaster »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #120
infecto wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

It is definitely not unfair. #2 is a great strategy, I'm gonna try in my agentic tool. We obviously need experts to steer the AIs in this current phase, who said we don't?

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#127

Post by dingnuts »

ikerino wrote: post #104
re-thc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

if Elon Musk hadn't convinced the world in 2015 that self driving cars were right around the corner, that could work with just a few sensors and machine learning, maybe we'd have smart highways now. Slightly less fancy technology communicating hazards and such to cars from sensors on the road.

But no, we have Waymo, I guess, so that means Musk was right?

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#128

Post by dingnuts »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #29
yaj54 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share some examples of these certain pieces of text and greatest pieces of code?

Well, if you want safety-critical code, you could have the LLM read this before asking it to write its own code: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1642624 GP was pondering about code re-use. My typical use involves giving an entire file to the LLM and asking the LLM to give the entire file back implementing requested changes, so that it's forced to keep the full text in context and can't get too off-track by focus…

Horrible, terrifying advice. If you want safety critical code, DON'T USE AN LLM AT ALL. Use formal verification methods!

This is a solved problem!

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#129

Post by wrasee »

_acco wrote: post #117
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.

If all these tools do is wipe out all the tedium in software then we are all laughing. Happy days to come.

There are tools and then there are the people holding the tools. The problem is no-one really knows which one AI is going to be.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#130

Post by owebmaster »

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!

LLMs don't have prompts, you can use prompts to query LLMs.

Agents are a mix of models, prompts, RAG and an event loop.

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