171–180 of 204 posts
"Misunderstood requirements" and "overly complex implementations" are practically our mascots at this point. We're slowly untangling this chaos through better upfront convos and iterative reviews, but man, habits die hard. Anyone else navigating these pitfalls totally unaided by AI?
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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 The first problem of the AI using outdated libraries sure it can be fixed if you are a competent developer who keeps up with industry standards.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.
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.
The excitement around AI coding tools isn't about chaining yourself to a crappy experience — it's about having support to offload cognitive overhead, reduce boilerplate, and help spot potential missteps early.
Sure, the current gen AI isn't quite there yet, but it can lighten the load, leaving more space to solving interesting problems, architecting elegant solutions and "figuring stuff out".
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 The first problem of the AI using outdated libraries sure it can be fixed if you are a competent developer who keeps up with industry standards.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?
Much of the marketing around agents is about not needing them. Zuck said Meta's internal agent can produce the code of an average junior engineer in the company. An average junior engineer doesn't need this level of steering to know to not include a 4 year old outdated library in a web project.
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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.
The (pretty substantial) difference is now the computer is telling you what to do.
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.
At some point in your career you realize every line of code you write is not just an asset—it's also a liability that needs to be maintained, debugged, and understood by others. The excitement around AI coding tools isn't about chaining yourself to a crappy experience — it's about having support to offload cognitive overhead, reduce boilerplate, and help spot potential missteps early. Sure, the current gen AI isn't q…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my every day experience that's pretty risky. The periphery as you call it is often an area where you lack the expertise to spot and correct AI mistakes. I am thinking about build systems and shell scripts. I see people everyday going to AI before even looking at the docs and invariably failing with non-existent command line options, or worst options that break things in very subtle ways. Same people that when you…
You're wrong. I have all the expertise but none of the time to generate 100s of lines of boilerplate API calls to get the data together, and no interest in formatting it correctly for consumption, let alone doing so state fully to allow interaction. These are trivial problems to solve that are highly tedious and do not affect whatsoever the business at hand. Perfect drudgery for automation, and just scanning the resu…
Time to learn some Emacs/Vim and Awk/Perl
I'm already seeing developers spending more time communicating with their AI than with their team. I don't think that's a good evolution. Many of us aren't the best communicators, but it's a skill we typically polish as we become more senior. I worry about what will happen to junior devs who spend more time talking to/pairing with AI tham their human coworkers.
Upfront context, precise statements of what is required, immediate constructive feedback? What's not to like?
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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.
Sure it is normal, but the reply was also a normal reply because, as you said it's a product with rough edges advertised as if it's completely functional. And the comment I replied to, criticizing the other reply, was not fair because he's only giving a normal reply, imo
We all know that this technology isn't magic. In tech spaces there are more people telling you it isn't magic than it is. The reminder does nothing. The contextual advice on how to tackle those issues does. Why even bother with that conversation, you can just take the advice or ignore it until the technology improves since you've already made up your mind about the limit you or others should be willing to go.
If it doesn't meet the standard of what you believe is advertised than say that. Not, "workarounds" are problematic because they obfuscate how someone should feel about how the product is advertised. Maybe you are an advertising purist and it bothers you, but why invalidate the person providing the context into how to utilize those tools in their current state better?