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Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

blog.alaindichiappari.dev

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Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#151

Post by manofmanysmiles »

scrame wrote: post #86
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better. I believe the argument from the other camp is that you don't need to understand the code anymore, just like you don't need to understand the assembly language.

quite a bit of software you would need to understand the assembly. not everything is web-services.

I've found LLMs (since Opus 4.5) exceptionally good at reading and writing and debugging assembly.

Give them gdb/lldb and have your mind blown!

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#152

Post by plagiarist »

feastingonslop wrote: post #136
ipsento606 wrote: post #115

> Software engineers are scared of designing things themselves. When I use a framework, it's because I believe that the designers of that framework are i) probably better at software engineering than I am, and ii) have encountered all sorts of problems and scaling issues (both in terms of usage and actual codebase size) that I haven't encountered yet, and have designed the framework to ameliorate those problems. Thos…

And there was a time when using libraries and frameworks was the right thing to do, for that very reason. But LLMs have the equivalent of way more experience than any single programmer, and can generate just the bit of code that you actually need, without having to include the whole framework.

I would like a more reliable way to activate this "way more experience."

What I see in my own domain I often recognize as superficially working but flawed in various ways. I have to assume the domains I am less familiar are the same.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#153

Post by sowbug »

capyba wrote: post #29
abcde666777 wrote: post #25

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing. 'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his s…

Your last sentence describes my thoughts exactly. I try to incorporate Claude into my workflow, just to see what it can do, and the best I’ve ended up with is - if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better. Even just some AI-assisted development in the trickier parts of my code bases completely robs me o…

That is what's hard about transitioning from coder to lead. A good coder makes full use of a single thread of execution. A good lead effectively handles the coordination of multiple threads. Different skills.

An LLM coding assistant today is an erratic junior team member, but its destructive potential is nowhere near some of the junior human engineers I've worked with. So it's worth building the skills and processes to work with them productively. Today, Claude is a singular thing. In six months or a year, it'll be ten or a hundred threads working concurrently on dozens of parts of your project. Either you'll be comfortable coordinating them, or you'll nope out of there and remain an effective but solitary human coder.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#154

Post by enraged_camel »

simonw wrote: post #118
abcde666777 wrote: post #25

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing. 'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his s…

Have you really never found writing code painful? CI is failing. It passed yesterday. Is there a flaky API being called somewhere? Did a recent commit introduce a breaking change? Maybe one of my third-party dependencies shipped a breaking change? I was going to work on new code, but now I have to spend between 5 minutes and an hour+ - impossible to predict - solving this new frustration that just cropped up. I love…

Incidentally, I've been using AI to deal with the weird bugs, cryptic errors and generally horrendous complexities of a framework we've been using at work (Elixir's Ash). It's really nice to no longer have to read badly organized docs, search the Internet for similar problems and ask around in the developers' Slack/Discord.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#155

Post by baq »

You can drop the boilerplate bit pushing glue frameworks, but the building block frameworks are here to stay; LLMs know a lot, but they don’t know every solution to every problem. Do not confuse a software development LLM assistant with an oracle.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#156

Post by hiq »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #22

I disagree about ditching abstractions. Programmatic abstractions aren't just a way to reduce the amount of code you write, they're also a common language to understand large systems more easily, and a way to make sure systems that get built are predictable.

This is even more relevant in the context of generated code, where most of the time is spent reviewing rather than writing the code. Abstractions, by allowing the code to be more concise, help.

With LLM code, I'd rather have higher-level abstractions.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#157

Post by nojito »

rglover wrote: post #139

A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code). The hubris around AI is goi…

>A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future.

Correct. Those who wave away coding agents and refuse to engrain them into their workflows are going to be left behind in the dust.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#158

Post by bdcravens »

rglover wrote: post #139

A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code). The hubris around AI is goi…

You still "find most stuff by building/struggling". You just move up stack.

> there will be a shift when all of these vibe code only folks get cooked in a way that's closer to existential than benign

For those who are "vibe code only", perhaps. But it's no different than the "coding bootcamp only" developers who never really learned to think holistically. Or the folks who learned the bare minimum to get those sweet dotcom boom dollars back in the day, and then had to return to selling cars when it call came crashing down.

The winners have been, and will always be, those who can think bigger. The ones today who already know how to build from scratch but then find the superpower is in architecture, not syntax, and suddenly find themselves 10x more productive.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#159

Post by cheema33 »

hakunin wrote: post #78
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better. I believe the argument from the other camp is that you don't need to understand the code anymore, just like you don't need to understand the assembly language.

Of all the points the "other side" makes, this one seems the most incoherent. Code is deterministic, AI isn’t. We don’t have to look at assembly, because a compiler produces the same result every time. If you only understand the code by talking to AI, you would’ve been able to ask AI “how do we do a business feature” and ai would spit out a detailed answer, for a codebase that just says “pretend there is a codebase h…

“Of all the points the other side makes, this one seems the most incoherent. Code is deterministic, AI isn’t. We don’t have to look at assembly, because a compiler produces the same result every time.”

This is a valid argument. However, if you create test harnesses using multiple LLMs validating each other’s work, you can get very close to compiler-like deterministic behavior today. And this process will improve over time.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#160

Post by bufordtwain »

abcde666777 wrote: post #25

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing. 'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his s…

I didn't fully realize how much pain there was until I started delegating the coding to AI. It's very freeing. Unfortunately I think this will soon lead to mass layoffs.
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