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Agentic Coding Is a Trap
171–180 of 403 posts
Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a junior builds something with agents that turns into a mess they can’t debug, that will teach them something. If they care about getting better, they will learn to understand why that happened and how to avoid it next time. It’s not all that different than writing code directly and having it turn into a mess they can’t debug—something we all did when we were learning to program. It is in many ways far easier to w…
> that will teach them something. If they care about getting better, This pre-supposes the idea that the business is _willing_ to let that happen, which is increasingly unlikely. The current, widespread attitude amongst stakeholders is “who cares, get the model to fix it and move on”. At least, when we wrote code by hand, needing to fix things by hand was a forcing function: one that now, from the business perspectiv…
If it’s broken and the dev can’t debug it, the business won’t have much of a choice.
Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap
#173I've come to the conclusion that if AI can do it, its not hard. None of the complicated software i work on can be reliably written by ai yet
Yeah this is the same conclusion I have. I primarily use AI for UI code, and guess what, it's all basically mechanical drudgery anyways. Put a div here, or put a Box here, apply some style rules, etc. This shit should have been automated decades ago yet for some reason we're still writing the same stuff with a different "twist" today. Now if your career is built on writing out the same boilerplate code in its infinit…
I had it throwing in free advice on my code working as intended, but not a normal pattern. It was something like:"Bonus! This bug exists!" And I had to tell it stop doing that. Or, for generated SQL renaming to keep deeply linked table columns human readable via comments it was - "You can't have a comment of this style here." It works perfectly so yes, yes I can.
I can certainly get it to do things that are reasonably common it seems like.
As for the article itself, I can agree with much of it.
Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap
#174Interestingly I’ve learned more about languages and systems and tools I use in the last few years working with agentic coding than I did in 35 years of artisanal programming. I am still vastly superior at making decisions about systems and techniques and approaches than the agentic tools, but they are like a really really well read intern who knows a great deal of detail about errata but have very little experience.…
> The claim you should know everything about everything you work on is an intensely naive one. I disagree with this take. Personally, I pride myself in learning the code bases I work on in detail, sometimes better than the leads for those code bases. I’m not saying that everyone should do so, but it’s achievable and not naive at all.
Knowing it better than the leads isn’t that hard - they spend most their life in meetings and teaching people how to think. Knowing the code base in detail is important - but I’m certain unless you wrote it all, there are parts you don’t know. I’m sure what you do is build enough scaffold understanding and depth in the core parts you can visit any part and understand it. But I’m also certain there are parts that based on pure recall you care unaware of the details. Someone else wrote it, you haven’t had to read it yet, and thus it’s a black box. Either that or your code base is quite small relative to the team size, or the team is very unproductive. The supposition one person is fully aware of any growing code base built by a team or organization - or a monorepo being built by 10,000 developers over 15 years - is prideful. A lot of it works because it works and you accept that unless you need to inspect a part because it’s not working. Whether a machine wrote it or an intern 10 years ago did, it’s a black box until it has to not be.
Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap
#175I can’t say that I’ve felt my skills atrophy, but I’ve also never found backend web development to be that difficult. 90% of my job for my entire career could be described as digital plumber.
Interesting analogy. Through the lens of a data driven design, all we are doing is taking data in shape A, transforming it to shape B, and then sending it somewhere else.
Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap
#176[deleted]
Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap
#177As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". I really don't like these meetings where you're dragged in in the middle of them without any clue. The questions came flying in fast, without any introduction, and this was about an external integration out of a dozen. They have their own lingo, different from ours, to make the situation worse. I had a _very…
> As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other. Good doctors often refuse to give any drugs or any advice until they understand the whole situation properly. If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back again…
> This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other.
Off topic, but this must be a USA-specific problem, where prescription drugs are actually marketed at Joe consumer. I think there is maybe one other country where this insane practice is allowed. Nowhere else are patients told to “Ask your doctor about Procrapin for your irritable bowl syndrome!!”
Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The claim you should know everything about everything you work on is an intensely naive one. I disagree with this take. Personally, I pride myself in learning the code bases I work on in detail, sometimes better than the leads for those code bases. I’m not saying that everyone should do so, but it’s achievable and not naive at all.
Knowing it better than the leads isn’t that hard - they spend most their life in meetings and teaching people how to think. Knowing the code base in detail is important - but I’m certain unless you wrote it all, there are parts you don’t know. I’m sure what you do is build enough scaffold understanding and depth in the core parts you can visit any part and understand it. But I’m also certain there are parts that base…
The question is one of is it easier to untangle llm code or human?
Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap
#179As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". I really don't like these meetings where you're dragged in in the middle of them without any clue. The questions came flying in fast, without any introduction, and this was about an external integration out of a dozen. They have their own lingo, different from ours, to make the situation worse. I had a _very…
> As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other. Good doctors often refuse to give any drugs or any advice until they understand the whole situation properly. If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back again…
> If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back against behaviour you don't like. You have the authority.
Not just that, but it seems like the grandparent had issues understanding what they were talking about. This is absolutely fine, and they should have just asked to continue explaining more until the problem was fully understood.
It’s obvious your opinion is important, but it’s not worth a lot if you don’t understand what the actual problem is.
Also, I personally don’t like to appeal to authority (not sure if that is what you meant), and instead just use the Socratic method to keep asking questions until they themselves understand the weaknesses. It’s a very friendly way of doing things.
Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap
#180> only a skilled developer who's thinking critically, and comfortable operating at the architectural level, can spot issues in the thousands of lines of generated code, before they become a problem. An additional factor: to find issues in generated code, the developer has to care . Many developers (especially at big firms) are already profoundly checked out from their work and are just looking for a way to close thei…
Indeed. Generated code is also harder to read because it violates all semantic expectations that rely on the mental model of a human author. A generated piece of code is linguistically plausible but often unknowingly imitates common idioms so incoherently that the actual bug may be accidentally disguised in a way no sane human (even a bad programmer) could have come up with. Since LLMs have no internal evaluation, as…
I tried to capture some of my feelings on this on a recent personal blog post/rant. The easiest phrase is that LLMs are "legacy code as a service". They are trained on other people's legacy code. (No one is intentionally feeding LLMs their best proprietary code.) They produce output that is "Day 1 Legacy Code" in the sense that there's no human code owner to take responsibility and you might be able to ask the LLM that built it questions, but it is easier to accept is as the LLM that wrote it is no longer at the company (between context/memory limitations and regular model upgrades/retrainings, etc).
But also, yeah, it starts to get worse than classic legacy code because you could try to build a theory of mind about the legacy code author(s). There were skills in trying to "mind read" a past generation. To find clues in poetry words more than the poetry form. (The variable names and whatever comments may have survived including commit logs; things written for humans to help explain the whys/hows, not just the whats.)