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Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

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Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#131

Post by john_strinlai »

mhitza wrote: post #78
spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

> GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. You know this is the exact same thing said during Opus 4.6, right? That makes it hard to believe because it's the same "last week's model was so much behind you can't even comprehend" meme that's been going on throughout last year. More info dumped into tickets and projects is great for understanding for both people and LLM. But hopefully not LLM genera…

>You know this is the exact same thing said during Opus 4.6, right?

spicyusername said this exact same thing about Opus 4.6?

or is there more than one person on HN, and perhaps they have different opinions?

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#132

Post by peab »

zozbot234 wrote: post #124
peab wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you say it has "nothing to do with software engineering" with a straight face? I think you might be in serious denial. Of course writing code isn't the only task of a software engineer, but it's an important one. There wouldn't be so much controversy if it wasn't the case

"Writing code" as a task of its own is called cowboy coding. It's neat that AI can do this now, but that has nothing to do with proper software engineering which always starts from a careful, human-led design.

"has nothing to do with proper software engineering"

So you're saying software engineers don't write code? Just because there are other things that SWEs do, does not mean it has nothing to do with it.

It's arguably a pretty important part. Would you really hire a software engineer who can't code?

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#133

Post by zjaffee »

melvinroest wrote: post #71
zjaffee wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except here's the thing, that's the sort of code that was extremely expensive before, in large part because of our day jobs (which still to this day require mindfulness and can't just be vibe-coded). However, an extra script here or there to make your life easier, adding extra UI features based on some datapoint to your internal dashboard, ect, these were things that could've taken a few days you didn't have before t…

Yea, the amount of dev tools I'm creating per project is astounding. Usually tools that help me to debug certain things better.

I think back to my past jobs how there were people who'd work weekends on random (not to technically difficult to implement) efforts that probably got them promoted, but we would never make time for during the regular work week that now would take next to no time to implement with AI.

Anyone with any small amount of creativity for this sort of thing could really make a big difference on improving the productivity of all sorts of team wide investigations as a running background task they have during their regular work.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#134

Post by jf22 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #124
peab wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you say it has "nothing to do with software engineering" with a straight face? I think you might be in serious denial. Of course writing code isn't the only task of a software engineer, but it's an important one. There wouldn't be so much controversy if it wasn't the case

"Writing code" as a task of its own is called cowboy coding. It's neat that AI can do this now, but that has nothing to do with proper software engineering which always starts from a careful, human-led design.

What's a good example of human-led design?

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#135

Post by xXSLAYERXx »

margalabargala wrote: post #114
neya wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing is a the role of a manager, not a software engineer. Software engineering has very little to do with writing code, but more on architecting at the higher level on what needs to be done. The code is just the executional part. LLMs can code? Ok good. Without a clear architectural pathway / direction, that code is just useless. It's not tech debt. It's just a bunch of random strings. You can argu…

Eh. It's "not software engineering" but neither was what most people writing code did before LLMs. > Without a clear architectural pathway / direction, that code is just useless. It's not tech debt. It's just a bunch of random strings This is pretty clearly false. It's a bunch of random strings that you can compile and run to do what you want. It's more akin to a black box. A compiled closed source dependency.

Agreed. I never considered myself an "engineer". Honestly just a regular code monkey. Software Engineer was just my job title. Folks higher up the ladder did engineer software. You know what? It sucked. Was always broken, we were always patching, we never saw around corners. But hey - they software engineered it.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#136

Post by swader999 »

girvo wrote: post #113
zozbot234 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A manager doesn't have to look at the code that's being shipped. An IC will still need to do that, and this will eventually take up much of their work. It can be addressed by moving up the stack to higher level and more strictly checked languages, where there's overall less stuff to review manually.

The dirty secret is all the people talking about shipping 4 features a day etc are just lying about reviewing anything. They don’t review it at all.

I review more thoroughly and faster with Claude than without.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#137

Post by mhitza »

john_strinlai wrote: post #131
mhitza wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. You know this is the exact same thing said during Opus 4.6, right? That makes it hard to believe because it's the same "last week's model was so much behind you can't even comprehend" meme that's been going on throughout last year. More info dumped into tickets and projects is great for understanding for both people and LLM. But hopefully not LLM genera…

> You know this is the exact same thing said during Opus 4.6, right? spicyusername said this exact same thing about Opus 4.6? or is there more than one person on HN, and perhaps they have different opinions?

There wasn't any personal mention in my post. A snark remark at the fact that this cycle keeps continuing and every new release is game changer except in the banchmarks where there is mostly a slight couple percent change, generally.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#138

Post by threepts »

neya wrote: post #104
spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

What you are describing is a the role of a manager, not a software engineer. Software engineering has very little to do with writing code, but more on architecting at the higher level on what needs to be done. The code is just the executional part. LLMs can code? Ok good. Without a clear architectural pathway / direction, that code is just useless. It's not tech debt. It's just a bunch of random strings. You can argu…

That is why we have SWE bench pro, they test architecture design too, turns out 1000 dollars of tokens outperform 10k dollars of labor in meta design.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#139

Post by isaacaggrey »

peab wrote: post #122
lionkor wrote: post #80

If writing code was the only part of the job, and it was easy, these jobs wouldn't pay so well. Engineering is hard. It's always going to be hard. I'm glad that AI makes some parts of it easier, and we (software engineers) can focus on engineering, that's nice. Code is NEVER cheap. Just because, at current completely unrealistic AI pricing, using agents is cheaper than hiring juniors, does not make code cheap. It mak…

"Producing code has always been low cost" Relative to what? I don't understand people dismissing the massive decrease in both cost of producing code and the speed of producing code. Before AI, people running businesses had similar issued as people have with AI now, but the costs were much greater. They could hire someone to write them a prototype for their idea, but it would cost them on the order of 1000s of dollars…

I understood it in the spirit of “code is a liability not an asset.” Code still needs to be maintained, changed, etc whether that is by a human or LLM.

In other words, just because more code can be produced quickly does not mean that it is cheap.

edit: I’m maybe hearing your point is that LLMs may change that POV but I think that is TBD.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#140

Post by peab »

isaacaggrey wrote: post #139
peab wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Producing code has always been low cost" Relative to what? I don't understand people dismissing the massive decrease in both cost of producing code and the speed of producing code. Before AI, people running businesses had similar issued as people have with AI now, but the costs were much greater. They could hire someone to write them a prototype for their idea, but it would cost them on the order of 1000s of dollars…

I understood it in the spirit of “code is a liability not an asset.” Code still needs to be maintained, changed, etc whether that is by a human or LLM. In other words, just because more code can be produced quickly does not mean that it is cheap. edit: I’m maybe hearing your point is that LLMs may change that POV but I think that is TBD.

I don't really think that's accurate either, from a business POV.

Software has been such a gold mine, exactly because the maintenance are minimal when you scale, compared to the revenue. The upfront costs are expensive, but once you have software built, in most cases it's relatively cheap to maintain

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