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Eight more months of agents

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Re: Eight more months of agents

#181

Post by pjc50 »

anthuswilliams wrote: post #43
dmk wrote: post #11

The real insight buried in here is "build what programmers love and everyone will follow." If every user has an agent that can write code against your product, your API docs become your actual product. That's a massive shift.

I'm very much looking forward to this shift. It is SO MUCH more pro-consumer than the existing SaaS model. Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation. It feels like every time I ask for programmatic access to SaaS tools in order to simplify a workflow, I get stuck in endless meetings with product managers trying to "understan…

> Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation

OK, but: that's an economic situation.

> so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on.

Right, so there's less profit in it.

To me it seems this will make the market more adversarial, not less. Increasing amounts of effort will be expended to prevent LLMs interacting with your software or web pages. Or in some cases exploit the user's agentic LLM to make a bad decision on their behalf.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#182

Post by habinero »

dagss wrote: post #85
hasperdi wrote: post #3

> It sounds like someone saying power tools should be outlawed in carpentry. I see this a lot here

On HN lately? Haven't seen anything about outlawing. But I see a lot of "powertools don't work and make me slower"

They're not powertools lol. Tech has plenty of powertools and we automated the crap out of our job already.

Writing code has never been the limiting factor, it's everything else that goes into it.

Like, I don't mind that there's a bunch of weekend warriors out here building shoddy gazebos and sheds with their brand new overpriced tools, incorrecting each other on the best way to do things. We had that with the bitcoin and NFT bros already.

What I do roll my eyes at is when the bros start talking about how they're totally going to build bridges and planes and it's gonna be soooo easy to get to new places, just slap down a bridge.

Uh huh. Y'all do not understand what building those actually entails lol.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#184

Post by co_king_3 »

bananaflag wrote: post #139
entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

I think, if there were to be a noticeable increase in software quantity due to agentic coding, we should test it by looking into indie games.

LLMs are unusably bad at generating game code

Re: Eight more months of agents

#185

Post by mtlynch »

> Along the way I have developed a programming philosophy I now apply to everything: the best software for an agent is whatever is best for a programmer.

I agree with this and I think it's funny to see people publish best practices for working with AI that are like, "Write a clear spec. Have a style guide. Use automated tests."

I'm not convinced it's 100% true because I think there are code patterns that AI handles better than humans and vice versa. But I think it's true enough to use as a guiding philosophy.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#186

Post by kombookcha »

pzo wrote: post #166
arrrg wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the hard problem isn’t building things, it’s knowing what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that makes something possible that wasn’t possible before). I don’t see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I also don’t see AI finding novel approaches to anything. Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewh…

> To me the hard problem isn’t building things, it’s knowing what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that makes something possible that wasn’t possible before). The problem with this that after doing this hard work someone can just copy easily your hard work and UI/UX taste. I think distribution will be very important in the future. W…

>The problem with this that after doing this hard work someone can just copy easily your hard work and UI/UX taste.

Or indeed, somebody might steal and launder your work by scooping them up into a training set for their model and letting it spit out sloppy versions of your thing.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#187

Post by bitwize »

skydhash wrote: post #98
bitwize wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there's a difference. Being opposed to AI-generated art/music/writing is valid because humans still contribute something extraordinarily meaningful when they do it themselves. There's no market for AI-generated music, and AI-generated art and writing tends to get called out right away when it's detected. People want the human expression in human-generated art, and the AI stuff is a weak placeholder at best. For s…

Ok, I’ll bite. What’s there to learn that you can tie directly to an increase of productivity? I can say “learn how to use vim makeprg feature so that you can jump directly to errors reported by the build and tool” and it’s very clear where the ROI. But all the AI hypers are selling are hope, prayers, and rituals.

The skill is learning to supply the LLM with enough context to do anything a developer does: turn specs into code, check its work including generating and running tests, debug and analyze the code for faults or errors, and run these in a loop to converge on a solution. If you're about to do something by hand in an IDE, STOP. Think about what the LLM will need to know to perform that task for you.

It may take some human intervention, but the productivity results are pretty consistent: tasks that used to take weeks now take hours or days. This puts in reach the ability to try things you wouldn't countenance otherwise due to the effort and tedium involved. You'd have to be a damn fool not to take advantage of the added velocity. This is why what we do is called "engineering", not a handicraft.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#188

Post by habinero »

dsign wrote: post #23

Look, I'm very negative about this AI thing. I think there is a great chance it will lead to something terrible and we will all die, or worse. But on the other hand, we are all going to die anyway. Some of us, the lucky ones, will die of a heart attack and will learn of our imminent demise in the second it happens, or not at all. The rest of us will have it worse. It has always been like that, and it has only gotten…

A lot of very silly people have convinced themselves and you of this, but it is not true, was never true, and is never going to be true.

We have a lot of actual problems to deal with that aren't telling ghost stories about sand. Focus on those.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#189

Post by kombookcha »

uludag wrote: post #118
baq wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good LLM wielders run in widening circles and get to the goal faster than good old school programmers running in a straight line

I try to avoid LLMs as much as I can in my role as SWE. I'm not ideologically opposed to switching, I just don't have any pressing need. There are people I work with who are deep in the AI ecosystem and it's obvious what tools they're using It would not be uncharitable in any way to characterize their work as pure slop that doesn't work, buggy, untested adequately, etc. The moment I start to feel behind I'll gladly s…

We are all constantly being gaslit. People have insane amounts of money and prestige riding on this thing paying off in such a comically huge way that it can absolutely not deliver on it in the foreseeable future. Creating a constant pressing sentiment that actually You Are Being Left Behind Get On Now Now Now is the only way they can keep inflating the balloon.

If this stuff was self-evidently as useful as it's being made out to be, there would be no point in constantly trying to pressure, coax and cajole people into it. You don't need to spook people into using things that are useful, they'll do it when it makes sense.

The actual use-case of LLMs is dwarfed by the massive investment bubble it has become, and it's all riding on future gains that are so hugely inflated they will leave a crater that makes the dotcom bubble look like a pothole.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#190

Post by habinero »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #61
blibble wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We all write insecure code in our first pass through no, we don't

Yes we do, you don't just start a brand new web project and spit out CORS rules, authentication schemes, roles, etc in one sitting do you? Are you an AI?

I actually do build all of those things before standing something up in prod. Not doing that is insane. Literally every web framework has reasonable defaults baked in.

Any competent tech company will have canned ways to do all of those things that have already been reviewed and vetted

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