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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

#121

Post by cruffle_duffle »

echelon wrote: post #30
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…

Please forgive me for being blunt, I want to emphasize how much this strikes me. Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules? If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript? There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA c…

> If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?

To go off the deep end… I actually think this LLM assistant stuff is a precondition to space exploration. I can see the need for a offline compressed corpus of all human knowledge that can do tasks and augment the humans aboard the ship. You’ll need it because the latency back to earth is a killer even for a “simple” interplanetary trip to mars—that is 4 to 24 minutes round trip! Hell even the moon has enough latency to be annoying.

Granted right now the hardware requirements and rapid evolution make it infeasible to really “install it” on some beefcake system but I’m almost positive the general form of moores law will kick in and we’ll have SOTA models on our phones in no time. These things will be pervasive and we will rely on them heavily while out in space and on other planets for every conceivable random task.

They’ll have to function reliably offline (no web search) which means they probably need to be absolutely massive models. We’ll have to find ways to selectively compress knowledge. For example we might allocate more of the model weights to STEM topics and perhaps less to, I dunno, the fall of the Roman Empire, Greek gods or the career trajectory of Pauly Shore. the career trajectory of Pauly Shore. But perhaps not, because who knows—-maybe a deep familiarity with Bio-Dome is what saves the colony on Kepler-452b

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#122

Post by m0llusk »

This is about green field development which is relatively rare. Much of the time the starting point is a bunch of code using React or maybe just a lump of PHP. Business logic ends up plunked down all over the place and LLMs tend to make a huge mess with all this unless kept on a tight leash.

I'm glad this guy is doing well, but I'm dreading the amount of work being created for people who can reverse engineer the mountains of hallucinated bullshit that he and others are now actively producing.

And if the frameworks aren't useful then maybe work up the chain and ditch compilers next?

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#123

Post by [deleted] »

netrem wrote: post #24

Using a framework gives you some assurance that the underlying methods are well designed. If you don't know how to spot issues in auth design, then using an LLM instead of a library is a bad idea. I agree though there's many non-critical libraries that could be replaced with helper methods. It also coincides with more awareness of supply chain risks.

[deleted]

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#124

Post by goosejuice »

bvan wrote: post #109

Intellectual surrender is exactly the risk I fear with coding agents. Will the next generation of software ‘developers’ still know how to code? Seems coding agents are in a way taking us further from understanding the machine, just like frameworks have in the past.

Software has always been about abstraction. This one, in a way, is the ultimate abstraction. However it turns out that LLMs are a pretty powerful learning tool. One just needs the discipline to use it.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#125

Post by strange_quark »

wtetzner wrote: post #39
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 think it's still an open question if it's actually a net savings of time.

The absence of evidence is evidence in its own way. I don’t understand how there haven’t been more studies on this yet. The one from last year that showed AI made people think they were faster but were actually slower gets cited a lot, and I know that was a small study with older tools, but it’s amazing that that hasn’t been repeated. Or maybe it has and we don’t know because the results got buried.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#126

Post by throwaw12 »

simonw wrote: post #118
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…

> I point Claude Code at it and 90% of the time I have the solution a couple of minutes later.

Same experience, I don't know why people keep saying code was easy part, sure, only when you are writing a boilerplate which is easy and expectations are clear.

I agree code is easier than some other parts, but not the easiest, industry employed millions of us, to write that easy thing.

When working on large codebases or building something in the flow, I just don't want to read all the OAuth2 scopes Google requires me to obtain, my experience was never: "now I will integrate Gmail, let me do gmail.FetchEmails(), cool it works, on to the next thing"

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#127

Post by Thanemate »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #62
capyba wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I believe the argument from the other camp is that you don't need to understand the code anymore, just like you don't need to understand the assembly language.

>I believe the argument from the other camp is that you don't need to understand the code anymore

Then what stops anyone who can type in their native language to, ultimately when LLM's are perfected, just order their own software instead of using anybody else's (speaking about native apps like video games, mobile phones, desktop, etc.)?

Do they actually believe we'll need a bachelor's degree to prompt program in a world where nobody cares about technical details, because the LLM's will be taking care of? Actually, scratch that. Why would the companies who're pouring gorrilions of dollars in investment even give access to such power in an affordable way?

The deeper I look in the rabbit hole they think we're walking towards the more issues I see.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#128

Post by jayd16 »

netrem wrote: post #24

Using a framework gives you some assurance that the underlying methods are well designed. If you don't know how to spot issues in auth design, then using an LLM instead of a library is a bad idea. I agree though there's many non-critical libraries that could be replaced with helper methods. It also coincides with more awareness of supply chain risks.

I think this is a subtle but important point.

If you use a well regarded library, you can trust that most things in it were done with intention. If an expectation is violated, that's a learning opportunity.

With the AI firehose, you can't really treat it the same way. Bad patterns don't exactly stand out.

Maybe it'll be fine but I still expect to see a lot of code bases saddled with garbage for years to come.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#129

Post by hakunin »

danny_codes wrote: post #120
ctoth wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s not _more_ deterministic. It’s deterministic, period. The LLMs we use today are simply not.
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