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Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

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Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#141

Post by troupo »

dotinvoke wrote: post #100
simonw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, my current opinion on this is that AI tools make development harder work . You can get big productivity boosts out of them but you have to be working at the top of your game - I often find I'm mentally exhausted after just a couple of hours.

My experience with AI tools is the opposite. The biggest energy thieves for me are configuration issues, library quirks, or trivial mistakes that are hard to spot. With AI I can often just bulldoze past those things and spend more time on tangible results. When using it for code or architecture or design, I’m always watching for signs that it is going off the rails. Then I usually write code myself for a while, to ke…

For me, LLMs always, without fail get important details wrong.

- incessantly duplicating already existing functionality: utility functions, UI components etc.

- skipping required parameters like passing current user/actor to DB-related functions

- completely ignoring large and small chunks of existing UI and UI-related functionality like layouts or existing styles

- using ad-hoc DB queries or even iterating over full datasets in memory instead of setting up proper DB queries

And so on and so forth.

YYMV of course depending on language and project

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#142

Post by troupo »

potatolicious wrote: post #54
mwigdahl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you're talking about a multistep process where each step beyond the first depends on the particular path the agent starts down, along with human input that's going to vary at each step. I made a crude first stab at an approach that at least uses similar steps and structure to compare the effectiveness of AI agents. My approach was used on a small toy problem, but one that was complex enough the ag…

What you're getting at is the heart of the problem with the LLM hype train though, isn't it? "We should have rigorous evaluations of whether or not [thing] works." seems like an incredibly obvious thought. But in the realm of LLM-enabled use cases they're also expensive . You'd need to recruit dozens, perhaps even hundreds of developers to do this, with extensive observation and rating of the results. So rather than…

Before you get into the expensive part, how do you get past "non-deterministic blackbox with unknown layers in between imposed by vendors"

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#143

Post by [deleted] »

themafia wrote: post #128
sunir wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We certainly will; they can’t replace humans in most language tasks without having a human like emotional model. I have a whole therapy set of agents to debug neurotic long lived agents with memory.

I like writing software. I hate managing people. What are we doing?

[deleted]

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#144

Post by imiric »

And here I am in October 2025 still using "AI" tools via a chat UI in Emacs, like a caveman. I've written some code to help me with managing context and such, but the tools are there when I need them, and otherwise stay out of my way.

I have no interest in trying to understand the thought process of people who write and work like this. They're more interested in chasing the latest overhyped trends produced by tech companies and influencers, than actually producing quality software that solves real-world problems. It's some weird product of the tech and social media echo chambers they perpetually live in, which I find difficult to describe.

But apparently I have to learn about "skills" and "superpowers" now... Give me a break.

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#145

Post by Fuzzwah »

simonw wrote: post #64
qsort wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Important: there is a lot of human coding, too. I'm not highlighting this to gloat or to prove a point. If anything in the past I have underestimated how big LLMs were going to be. Anyone so inclined can take the chance to point and laugh at how stupid and wrong that was. Done? Great. I don't think I've been intentionally avoiding coding assistants and as a matter of fact I have been using Claude Code since the lit…

Yeah, my current opinion on this is that AI tools make development harder work . You can get big productivity boosts out of them but you have to be working at the top of your game - I often find I'm mentally exhausted after just a couple of hours.

Copilot is the perfect name.

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#147

Post by simonw »

troupo wrote: post #141
dotinvoke wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with AI tools is the opposite. The biggest energy thieves for me are configuration issues, library quirks, or trivial mistakes that are hard to spot. With AI I can often just bulldoze past those things and spend more time on tangible results. When using it for code or architecture or design, I’m always watching for signs that it is going off the rails. Then I usually write code myself for a while, to ke…

For me, LLMs always, without fail get important details wrong. - incessantly duplicating already existing functionality: utility functions, UI components etc. - skipping required parameters like passing current user/actor to DB-related functions - completely ignoring large and small chunks of existing UI and UI-related functionality like layouts or existing styles - using ad-hoc DB queries or even iterating over full…

Sounds to me like you'd benefit from providing detailed instructions to LLMs about how they should avoid duplicating functionality (which means documenting the functionality they should be aware of), what kind of parameters are always required, setting up "proper DB queries" etc.

... which is exactly the kind of thing this new skills mechanism is designed to solve.

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#149

Post by simonw »

nightski wrote: post #87
simonw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest problem in computer science in 2025 is presenting an example of AI-assisted programming that somebody won't call "trivial".

If all I did was call it trivial that would be a fair critique. But it was followed up with a lot more justification than that.

Here's the PR. It touched 21 files. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9116/files

If that's your idea of trivial then you and I have very different standards in terms of what's a trivial change and what isn't.

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#150

Post by drivebyhooting »

ehsanu1 wrote: post #140
csar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious how you think this compares to the Research -> Plan -> Implement method and prompts from the “Advanced Context Engineering from Agents” video when it comes to actual coding performance on large codebases. I think picking up skills is useful for broadening agents abilities, but I’m not sure I’d that’s the right thing for actual development. The packaged collection is very cool and so is the idea of automat…

Using Research->Plan->Implement flow is orthogonal, though I notice parts of those do exist as skills too. But you sometimes need to do other things too, e.g. debugging in the course of implementing or specific techniquws to improve brainstorming/researching. Some of these skills are probably better as programmed workflows that the LLM is forced to go through to improve reliability/consistency, that's what I've found…

Orthogonal means there should not be any overlap.
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