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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?

#171

Post by philwelch »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103
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…

> Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap. Software to do what, though ?! Coding, maybe 10% of a developers job (Brooks "Silver Bullet" estimates 1/6), was never the bottleneck, and even if you automated that away entirely then you've only reduced development time by 10% (assuming you are not doing human code review etc). I would also argue that software development as a whole (not just the co…

As I recall, “No Silver Bullet” fundamentally rested on the assumption that the subroutine was the last word in abstractions to make programming more efficient, which probably wasn’t even defensible at the time because Lisp had already been invented, and is even less defensible after the past several decades of programming language research. Brooks was still onto something when it came to irreducible complexity, but offloading complexity an LLM can tackle to the LLM still saves time.

One of the lesser discussed Brooks essays is actually the best description of AI-first development: the “surgical team”. It just turns out the surgeon is the only human, and like many modern surgeries, the surgeon is controlling a robot instead of operating by hand.

It would be interesting to reread The Mythical Man-Month and see how each essay applies to AI-first development.

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

#172

Post by aspectrr »

faangguyindia wrote: post #5

I am in India, junior developer hiring is all down. Ai has reduced offshoring to India and eliminated the need for janitor work (often offloaded to juniors). Many people are finding it difficult to even land internships. The most affected areas are sysadmin, devops, and frontend. Where you'll have very hard time getting any offer. Companies like BrowserStack are withdrawing campus placement offers. Meanwhile, I am wr…

I'm surprised sys-admin hires are down, is AI doing a lot of that as well?

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

#173

Post by shimman »

peab wrote: post #161
shimman wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can assure you a sizable amount of people in the writing community look down on "authors" that only use ghostwriters.

Why do tech workers act shock that people hate this junk being force fed to them that they are now resorting to violence to reject said junk?

You think telling humans with specialized crafts that they don't matter is good politics? Good grief.

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

#175

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

threepts wrote: post #167
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't sound to me like this benchmark is attempting to measure architecture design. As far as I see in the paper, they do not evaluate the architectural quality of a task completion, only whether the model is capable of completing it at all.

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

#176

Post by philwelch »

alrtkh wrote: post #79
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…

For people who like to tick boxes, which is essentially most of the above, AI is welcome. That includes managers. It still has nothing to do with software engineering. All good code was written by humans. AI took it, plagiarizes it, launders it and repackages it in a bloated form. Whenever I look deeply at an AI plagiarized mess, it looks like it is 90% there but in reality it is only 50%. Fixing the mess takes longe…

You’re reminding me a lot of those old assembly hackers who thought compilers were bullshit because they could hand-write better assembly. And I don’t mean that as an insult; those guys were probably right about their assembly code, just like an Amish craftsman will make better furniture than a factory in China. The problem is that the world needs more furniture and more software than skilled craftsmen can produce, and the skill gap between the craftsman and the mass production process is diminishing fast.

We’re still going to have handwritten software, just like we still have handwritten assembly. It just won’t be the norm.

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

#177

Post by chorsestudios »

banannaise wrote: post #163
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…

People noted similar issues ever since LLMs came out, but the rate at which they have been rapidly improving on all of these is significant. Documentation being 4x too long could probably be fixed with a rule instructing the agent to keep it concise and no longer than 2-3 paragraphs.

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

#179

Post by arnitdo »

Tade0 wrote: post #127
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…

> fixing issues is now basically free if your company is willing to shell out for tokens. Yeah, about that: I looked into Cursor's usage stats and daily I'm going through the equivalent of a bacon sandwich in my cantina, so not much, but this is at today's prices and very light usage of Sonnet. I was for a time using Opus 4.6 for a heavier task and even then I think the cost was well into the double digit percentages…

Watch token budget be included as part of employee TC figures - I feel this is an eventuality due to rising costs and "true pricing" slowly creeping in.

Current ventures feel moreso like a pilot program (you bought a private jet, now get a couple of your pilots to actually fly it) versus having an entire fleet of jets, and having to pay salaries to all those pilots, plus account for their fuel charges.

Right now all expenses are relatively "someone else's {problem,money,infra}".

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

#180

Post by arnitdo »

globnomulous wrote: post #151
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…

I was an LLM naysayer for a very long time. I continue to have serious reservations about the ethics of LLM use and the likely economic effects (these tools are likely to empower the owners of capital and disempower labor). On the other hand, I had a rather striking experience the other day that convinced me that the future in which these tools write software may not be so bad: I had an idea to improve performance in…

> Could I have written it without Claude? Yes, definitely. But I was able to produce the code in a few days while having a fever of 100-102, which I definitely couldn't have done on my own.

While I admire your strength in attempting it, this just adds one more brick to the wall of precedents that "what's stopping you from just sending one prompt, it'll just take 30 seconds and you can do it in bed!"

You could sum it up into a simple equation as Features Shipped = Features/Hour * Developer Hours

Developer hours has remained a constant, and F/H has gone up. I am of the opinion that the ideal is the inverse.

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