171–180 of 232 posts
The most honest, logical, and practical take I've seen on this. People consistently underestimate the skill and effort it takes to write precisely and think critically both about their problem, and their processes. The closer you are to knowing what to ask for in the way knowledgeable people ask for it with respect to the process you are using to complete work, the closer the output will be to what you want.
I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…
If your consciousness is driving, your brain is internally aligned. You type as you think. You can get flow state, or at least find a way to think around a problem.
If you're working with someone else and having to discuss everything as you go, then it's just a different activity. I've collaboratively written better code this way in the past. But it's slower and more exhausting.
Like pair programming, I hope people realise that there's a place for both, and doing exclusively one or the other full time isn't in everyone's best interests.
I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent. But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Review…
10k, really? Are you supposed to understand all that code? This is crazy and a one way street to burnout.
"If you don't know what you want your code to do, the computer sure as heck won't know either." I keep this with me today. Before I run my code for the first time or turn on my hardware for the first time, I ask myself, "What _exactly_ am I expecting to see here?" and if I can't answer that it makes me take a closer and more adversarial look at my own output before running it.
So I'm writing code by hand today and using Claude to track down type and dependency errors. It feels good, I might do this for a while.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The velocity is up AND the quality is up. This is not my experience on a team of experienced SWEs working on a product worth 100m/year. Agents are a great search engine for a codebase and really nice for debugging but anytime we have it write feature code it makes too many mistakes. We end up spending more time tuning the process than it takes to just write the code AND you are trading human context with agent cont…
I can't speak to your experience. I can only speak to mine. We've spent years reducing old debt and modernizing our application and processes. The places where we've made that investment are where we are currently seeing the additional acceleration. The places where we haven't are still stuck in the mud, but per your "search engine for a codebase" comment our engineers are starting to engage with systems they would n…