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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?

#161

Post by peab »

shimman wrote: post #152
peab wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"has nothing to do with proper software engineering" So you're saying software engineers don't write code? Just because there are other things that SWEs do, does not mean it has nothing to do with it. It's arguably a pretty important part. Would you really hire a software engineer who can't code?

Writing code and copying the output of an LLM is absolutely not the same. You wouldn't call someone an author that takes LLM outputs and shoves it in a book. IDK why this distinction doesn't apply to devs too.

You call someone an author when they use a ghostwriter. They're giving inputs that are core to the output, even though they aren't doing all the writing. Same thing.

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

#162

Post by maccard »

anthonyrstevens wrote: post #149
mhitza wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> which is expected if the models are in fact getting better at agentic coding

Is it? Or is it also explainable that the models are not getting better but people are still adopting it.

If the models were getting we’d be seeing mobile apps with new features at 10x the rate previously, or websites with 4 times the number of features. But we’re not.

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

#163

Post by banannaise »

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…

The ticket has subtle errors in its description that are only caught by someone experienced with the codebase.

The code hides an exception behind an if-then-else that defaults to the most common state, which isn't caught until it breaks things for the 1% of users who don't have that state.

The new feature quietly breaks a feature not covered by the acceptance tests.

The documentation is four times as long and nobody who relies on it can read it.

And I'm stuck spending my time going over tickets with a fine-toothed comb, reviewing PRs, and mentoring contributors to prevent all of this garbage from ending up in the live code.

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

#164

Post by simonw »

miltonlost wrote: post #116
simonw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that Microsoft and Amazon's sponsorship of Overture comes with an understanding that people who work on Overture will spend their time writing articles that "boost AI"? Does "boosting AI" include opening an article with "Frontier models are really good at coding these days, much better than they are at other tasks"?

How is that not boosting AI? It's certainly not denigrating it

I read it as mild denigration, because the AI companies would very much like you to believe that agentic AI works great for everything beyond code.

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

#167

Post by threepts »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #141
threepts wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can read the paper here: https://labs.scale.com/papers/swe_bench_pro

TL;DR its very effective as it directly tests model on REAL codebases: "The benchmark is constructed from GPL-style copyleft repositories and private proprietary codebases". The use case is very real.

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

#170

Post by ariedro »

agency wrote: post #110
duskdozer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I regularly ship four features at a time now across multiple projects. Well, this explains why so much software nowadays is so slow, buggy, and chaotic.

Unlike 3 years ago, when nobody complained about software being slow, buggy and chaotic

Hell has no true bottom.
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