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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?

#141

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

threepts wrote: post #138
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…

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.

That's just not accurate. I haven't studied SWE Bench Pro in detail, so I can't tell you exactly what the flaw is, but SOTA models routinely make bad architectural choices I have to intervene to fix.

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

#142

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

jnwatson wrote: post #102
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.

Just like a manager, you don't need to look at the code. You need to set up quality systems to provide evidence the code does what it is supposed to do, just like a manager.

Code review has a number of important purposes beyond merely verifying functionality. It's true that some managers don't recognize this, fail to allocate time for anything but feature work, and then wonder a few years later why the software is so buggy and new feature development is so hard.

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

#143

Post by jerf »

We change how we value code: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/

Short-short version, code will still be accruing value in proportion to how much of the real world it has encountered. The bottleneck on building valuable code will be how much real world there is to go around. As is so often the case, what may initially seem to kill SaaS will actually make them stronger as they end up with more exposure to the real world than some random guy's random AI code.

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

#144

Post by lionkor »

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'm not dismissing it, I'm saying it's never been the bottleneck. Like you said, the feedback loop is A bottleneck, so is figuring out all the nasty things that nobody on HN seems to have heard of before, like "what are the requirements", "which tradeoffs can we make to get this done in time", "what is the architecture for this", and building it in such a way that you can guarantee that it won't fall apart in 20 years when your requirements change.

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

#145

Post by satvikpendem »

consp wrote: post #65
faangguyindia wrote: post #5

I am in India, junior developer hiring is all down. Ai has reduced offshoring to India and eliminated the need for janitor work (often offloaded to juniors). Many people are finding it difficult to even land internships. The most affected areas are sysadmin, devops, and frontend. Where you'll have very hard time getting any offer. Companies like BrowserStack are withdrawing campus placement offers. Meanwhile, I am wr…

Looking at the entire market in Europe it is also down but that is not due to "AI" but because they are easiest to fire with least consequences. There is a global recession looming, despite Wall Street saying otherwise.

Europe is easiest to fire? I would've thought the opposite.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103
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…

> Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap. Software to do what, though ?! Coding, maybe 10% of a developers job (Brooks "Silver Bullet" estimates 1/6), was never the bottleneck, and even if you automated that away entirely then you've only reduced development time by 10% (assuming you are not doing human code review etc). I would also argue that software development as a whole (not just the co…

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by anthonyrstevens »

mhitza wrote: post #137
john_strinlai wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You're missing the point that it's (conceivably, and probably) different people making the comments. Each model release has a few new converts, which is expected if the models are in fact getting better at agentic coding.

You're implying it's a hype train when in fact it's an adoption curve.

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

#150

Post by AtlasBarfed »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #81
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…

> I regularly ship four features at a time now across multiple projects. Many people are missing the fact that LLMs allow ICs to start operating like managers. You can manage 4 streams now. Within a couple years, you may be able to manage 10 streams like a typical manager does today. IME, LLMs don't speed you up that much if 1) you're already an expert at what you're doing (inherently not scalable), 2) you're only wo…

A software engineer was always a manager.

Software engineers were always creating, maintaining and updating automated business processes. In olden days we would have computers, that is rows of people computing things. That room of people is replaced with code in von Neumann machines.

The economic tension has always been a resistance to grant programmers status and class of management. Instead management wants to treat programmers like labor.

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