121–130 of 137 posts
I feel like these are two competing goals: * the dev wants to describe an app in natural language then fall asleep while an AI works on it * the dev wishes that the same AI would write less comprehensive tests What exactly is a vibe coder to this dev?
this question, (with it's preceding set-up) pierces though a lot of cruft. Well-posed.
I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding. And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application t…
Holy shit.
Our AI agent is like a dumb monkey with all the knowledge of Humanity, so a few guardrails are needed. In case it helps anyone, this is how I did describe my desired harness, from scratch. I didn't know nor wanted to write all the ".vscode/skills" files, or the AGENTS.md file or any of that, so I asked Opus to "write a Harness and all related skills as needed, to follow this procedure on absolutely every change"... I…
I feel this, yes. In effect, I’ve always wanted a pair programmer agent, not a zero to one programming agent. Unfortunately models these days are mostly of the latter kind and it has caused a major disruption in the way I work. I’d much rather appreciate a small model making fast and specific edits that I ask if it, rather than ingesting 20 files to make changes, and then starting to write tests, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt. because that's how agents are marketed.
we should exercise critical thinking then heaps of people on this site expect them to be omnipotent then claim it’s fake when it doesn’t read minds
It might do Y, but Y does not excuse so high valuations and investments, so they claim X.
It is ok to judge them by !X.
Most, if not all, of the code in the company I work in is written by AI. Our tests are useless. We have tests that make sure that mongoose schemas are creating the collections defined in them. We have tests that check that zod shcemas parse objects currently. Every PR, even if 1 line change, will drag 25 file changes because our tests are so ad-hoc, so verbose, and so incompatible with each other. Imagine how the cod…
A project I was working on for a couple years until this spring started to turn like this when another contractor started committing AI work. There was a test literally called “test_imports.py” that, you know, tested that you could import every module of the project. I asked if we could just run `python __main__.py` to test that the imports worked, but he said no, we need this for big Claude-powered refactors to make…
Yet, we are being sold that this is _the way weve all been waiting for_ ? what?!
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> I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. > And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application that I intend to open source. It's about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline. Indeed; non-overlapping Overton windows. edit: I'm going bluntly ask, after pondering thi…
Not satire. But I can understand why my comment seemed contradictory. I've been designing software for a long time, but I'm nowhere near as good as most career SDEs I know (my career path has been SDE-adjacent). So it's not like I sat down and independently told various LLMs how to build out all these guardrails. I make high level architecture decisions and nudge them in the right direction ("use RabbitMQ", "trunk-ba…
I get the same kind of snarky comments when I talk about it. Amazing how people who know nothing about the project think they know better than me about its quality or maintainability.
I doubt it's anything in particular that we are doing, I suspect it is rather a lack of trying and experience with the ones who are claiming agentic development does not work.
I have not once seen a believable story where for example the project broke down after 200k LOC, or after going live.
It is always inane stuff like in the OP, like the agent supposedly generated only tests and no code, sure.
Most of the ones I have seen were "I generated some code and did not like the output". No attempts of iterating and refactoring.
I believe they simply did not yet try our way of working.
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I think this is the only sensible way to work with agents, if you care about code quality and reliability but still want the benefits of AI. There seem to be three camps that people more or less fall into: (a) AI is terrible/bad/evil and should never be used, (b) you should one-shot everything and be happy if it seems to "work" when you try it, (c) the middle ground, where the AI writes code which you carefully revie…
I think it must depend at least partially on the task, too. At the extreme, there are things where you won't care beyond "it seems to work" because you only needed it to run once and it got useful results.
The problems start when you don't have clean separations. If your GUI code is also implementing ad hoc business logic like policies and workflows etc then you won't know what you care about and what you don't.
So you need to build little ring fenced enclaves where you can say "do whatever you want to implement this interface with this behaviour". If it gets fucked up you could just throw away the whole module and start again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A project I was working on for a couple years until this spring started to turn like this when another contractor started committing AI work. There was a test literally called “test_imports.py” that, you know, tested that you could import every module of the project. I asked if we could just run `python __main__.py` to test that the imports worked, but he said no, we need this for big Claude-powered refactors to make…
I believe software will go the same road as the cloth industry went. From quality cloth that holds for years, to shit quality cloth that look good but doesnt hold more than few month. Yet, we are being sold that this is _the way weve all been waiting for_ ? what?!