What they are basically saying : a framework built up from bash-or-makefile-ground by an LLM, is better than any existing framework. I don't agree. When I use LLMs to generate scripts for me, I often have to adapt them to fit in the bigger picture. The more scripts I have, the more blurred becomes what that framework as a whole stands for. Then to become a usable framework, refactoring is needed, which means the calls to those scripts need rewriting and retesting as well.
Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
161–170 of 611 posts
Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
#162> 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…
after 3 decades as SWE I mostly found both i) and ii) to not be true, for the most part. a lot of frameworks are not built from the ground up as “i am building a thing to solve x” but “i had a thing and built something that may (or may not) be generally useful.” so a lot of them carry weight from what they were originally built from. then people start making requests to mold the framework to their needs, some get implemented, some don’t. those that don’t good teams will build extensions/plugins etc into the framework and pretty soon you got a monster thing inside of your codebase you probably did not need to begin with. i think every single ORM that i’ve ever used fits this description.
Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
#163"Software engineers are scared of designing things themselves."
So the answer is to let AI agents design it for you, trained on the data of the giants of software engineering. Got it!
Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
#164A 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…
I don't think there's going to be any catastrophic collapse but I predict de-slopping will grow to occupy more and more developer time.
Who knows, maybe soon enough we'll have specially trained de-slopper bots, too.
Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
#165lol ok have fun building from zero _without_ abstractions. It will work for the narrow thing you first tell it to build, the fun comes when you tell it to change in any way.
Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So many of my coding agent sessions start with "clone into /tmp for reference" - it's such a great pattern because incomplete or inaccurate decimation matters way less if the agent can dispatch a sub-agent to explore the codebase any time it needs to answer an obscure question.
Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
#167I see Libraries and frameworks as a way to capture knowledge and best practices so it can be shared with other people. So looking wat a LLM/AI does, it looks to me that this would be a perfect fit. Without the dependeny hell, unresolved github issues, need to fork and leaving maintainers. It could be opensource on steroïdes, with far shorter feedbackloops (just working in your IDE).
The main burden I see is validation of the output and getting reproducable results. As with many AI solutions.
Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
#168A 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.
Doubt on that. AI usually only wastes time and produces bugs.
> bbut you're holding it wrong, just two more prompts and three more agents and it will be a real boy
So, you invented an IDE, except more opaque and expensive? Welcome to the club.
Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
#169I don't see it as either/or. Frameworks give you a common vocabulary to use with the LLMs, and what allow you to organize your thoughts and maintain good git hygiene, and serve as a useful street map to review and explore what's been built.
Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
#170> 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.
> can generate just the bit of code that you actually need
Design is the key. Codebases (libraries and frameworks not exempt,) have a designed uniformity to them. How does a beginner learn to do this sort of design? Can it be acquired completely by the programmer who uses LLMs to generate their code? Can it be beneficial to recognize opinionated design in the output of an LLM? How do you come to recognize opinion?
In my personal history, I've worked alongside many programmers who only ever used frameworks. They did not have coding design sensibilities deeper than a social populist definition of "best practice." They looked to someone else to define what they can or cannot do. What is right to do.