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The role of developer skills in agentic coding

martinfowler.com

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Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#151

Post by beardedwizard »

owebmaster wrote: post #126
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your reply is a bit unfair. The first problem of the AI using outdated libraries sure it can be fixed if you are a competent developer who keeps up with industry standards. But if you need someone like that to guide an AI, then "agentic" coding loses a lot of its "agentic" ability which is what the article is talking about. If you need enthusiasts and experts to steer the AIs, they are a bit like "full self d…

It is definitely not unfair. #2 is a great strategy, I'm gonna try in my agentic tool. We obviously need experts to steer the AIs in this current phase, who said we don't?

Where are the goalposts then? If the answer is always "you are prompting it wrong" then there are no goalposts for agentic development.

Where is the consensus position that is demonstrably more effective than traditional development?

My observation is that it's somewhere close to "start this project and set an overall structure", after that nobody seems to agree.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#152

Post by meowface »

codr7 wrote: post #114

I don't get it, at all. Why are experienced developers so enthusiastic about chaining themselves to such an obviously crappy and unfulfilling experience? I like writing code and figuring stuff out, that's why I chose a career in software development in the first place.

Because on net it often saves tons and tons of time and effort if you know how to use it.

Luddism is a strange philosophy for a software engineer.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#154

Post by kristopolous »

ozim wrote: post #116
kristopolous wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 has an easy fix. Clone the dependency you want to use in the directory of your code. Instruct it to go into the directory and look at that code in order to complete task X: "I've got a new directory xyz, in it contains a library to do feature abc. I'll need to include it here to do A to function B and so on" The weird version mixing bug will disappear. If it's closed source, then just do the documentation. You nee…

This feels like when I explain to a layperson cool dev tool like GIT. They just roll eyes and continue to do copies of the files they work on. I just roll eyes on that explanation because it exactly feels like additional work I don’t want to do. Doing my stuff the old way works right away without having to do some explanation tricks and setting up context for the tool I expect to do correct thing on the first go.

it's clearly a preference I feel strongly about. I've been programming for over 30 years btw - I can manually do this. It's a new tool I'm trying to learn.

I was personally clocking in about 1% of the openrouter token count last year every day. openrouter has grown quite a bit, but I realize I'm certainly in the minority/on the edge here.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#155

Post by marcellus23 »

codr7 wrote: post #114

I don't get it, at all. Why are experienced developers so enthusiastic about chaining themselves to such an obviously crappy and unfulfilling experience? I like writing code and figuring stuff out, that's why I chose a career in software development in the first place.

I can imagine people making the same argument decades ago about higher-level languages being "crappy and unfulfilling" compared to writing assembly. After all, you're not even writing the instructions yourself, you're just describing what you want and the computer figures out what to do.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#156

Post by nyrikki »

Derbasti wrote: post #100
nottorp wrote: post #86

Does anyone post articles about using these LLMs on non web dev? The internet is full of javascript/html/css info. Some wrong some obsolete some right and current, but there is data. How about the more peasant languages?

Anecdotally, it does somewhat fine with C++ and OpenCV. Python is great, though PySide much less so. QML is almost useless. GLSL is OK, but not great. It generally can't reason well across language barriers, although it's great at converting between languages. The deeper into a nerdy domain I go, the less likely it is to understand what's going on. And more broadly, it seems that usefulness steeply declines for large…

Even Python gets a bit touchy if you ask it to avoid common packages.

An example is asking for simple Kalman filter, limiting to 2x2 matrix to avoid the need for LU decomposition. If you ad to the prompt a constraint to not use Numpy, which almost everything in the corpus does.

Even with LRM's having a high enough top-k accuracy, so that at least one correct solution given in k guesses seems to be the trick.

Perhaps Pyhon+Numpy is a language barrier but the errors without Numpy seem really trivial, similar to what one would see on an obscure language. It is different across different models, but getting stuck generating verification code with divide by zero to giving up and producing code that uses numpy are failure modes I have seen.

Professor Subbarao Kambhampati's explanation really helps here IMHO.

https://bsky.app/profile/rao2z.bsky.social/post/3lkjnrrv2qk2...

"Compiling the signal verifier" in, at least superficially to me, is a good intuition on where these fail.

The limits of Top-K and heavy tail dependance in many tasks will be something painful, I think we will need more expertise and not less among programers just due to the failings of us humans and our over trust of automation etc...

How we change the career path to develop tacit and technical abilities is a big question personally.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#157

Post by tippytippytango »

nukem222 wrote: post #92
ikerino wrote: post #12

I use Cursor for most of my development these days. This article aligns pretty closely with my experiences. A few additional observations: 1. Anecdotally, AI agents feel stuck somewhere circa ~2021. If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago. This is incredibly frustrating to watch and correct for. Providing explicit instructions for which pac…

I agree with all of this. I want to offer a tiny bit more hope, though: > There have been a lot of bold promises (and genuine advances), but I don't see a world in the next 5 years where AI writes useful software by itself. I actually think the opposite: that within five years, we will be seeing AI one-shot software, not because LLMs will experience some kind of revolution in auditing output, but because we will move…

It’s fascinating how the debate is going exactly as the car debate went. People were arguing for a whole spectrum of environment modifications for self driving cars.

I’ll take the other side of that bet. The software industry won’t make things easier for LLMs. A few will try, but will get burned by the tech changing too fast to target. Seeing this, people will by and large stay focused on designing their ecosystems for humans.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#158

Post by malyk »

codr7 wrote: post #114

I don't get it, at all. Why are experienced developers so enthusiastic about chaining themselves to such an obviously crappy and unfulfilling experience? I like writing code and figuring stuff out, that's why I chose a career in software development in the first place.

Because you'll be replaced by those engineers in N months/years when they can outperform you because they are wizards with the new tools.

It's like failing to adopt compiled code and sticking to punch cards. Or like refusing to use open source libraries and writing everything yourself. Or deciding that using the internet isn't useful.

Yes, developing as a craft is probably more fulfilling. But if you want it to be a career you have to adapt. Do the crafting on your own time. Employers won't pay you for it.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#159

Post by radlad »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #120
infecto wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very typical reply when we see someone excited about AI and then a luddite needs to come along and tell them why they should not be so excited and helpful. I mostly jest but your comment comes off quite unhelpful and negative. The person you replied to wasn’t blaming the parent comment, just offering helpful tips. I agree that today’s AI tools aren’t perfect, but I also think it’s important for developers t…

I think your reply is a bit unfair. The first problem of the AI using outdated libraries sure it can be fixed if you are a competent developer who keeps up with industry standards. But if you need someone like that to guide an AI, then "agentic" coding loses a lot of its "agentic" ability which is what the article is talking about. If you need enthusiasts and experts to steer the AIs, they are a bit like "full self d…

I don't see how it's unfair at all. This is novel technology with rough edges. Sharing novel techniques for working around those rough edges is normal. Eventually we can expect them to be built-in to the tools themselves (see MCP for how you might inject this kind of information automatically.) A lot of development is iterative and LLMs are no exception.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#160

Post by kristopolous »

airstrike wrote: post #136
andai wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.

I need that on a shirt

Finding a way to convince yourself something is easy is the best trick to unblocking yourself and stopping distractions. This is the closest thing I know to the "1 simple trick" thing.
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