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Agentic Coding Is a Trap

larsfaye.com

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Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#181

Post by bhagyeshsp »

sterlind wrote: post #160
bhagyeshsp wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-taught, "junior" here. Due to English-language limitation my most adult life, I struggled to code. Used visual coding etc. But of course, I can't make a living on drag-and-drop harness. Comes in GPT-3.5, accelerated my learning. Now I'm running my incorporated company, just launched one software-hardware hybrid product. Second one is a micro-SaaS in closed beta. The point is: when people use "juniors" as a fixed…

accelerated what learning? learning to code? learning to engineer? learning to manage? learning to market?

Learning the fundamentals of programming and their translation to code. I'm decent at engineering, managing and marketing solutions.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#182

Post by WorldMaker »

wiieee wrote: post #163
zbentley wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree with any of that, but I think the brutal truth is that the priority of most businesses was always that approximate, slipshod, business-driven development. The human engineering process was only coincidentally a check back against the worst outcomes of that philosophy, not intentionally one.

Yeah but all these firms are going to get destroyed by firms led by people who are more disciplined and enforce rigour in thought etc that’ll be pushed through discouraging over-use of llm’s. Apple didn’t go from near bankrupt to where it is today without that discipline.

We can hope. The markets are rarely rational to begin with and we live in a time where the biggest measuring stick for most companies is "what have you done in the last 3 months". There's not a lot of pressure on companies in today's marketplace to do the right thing over the "right now" thing or the fast broken thing or the dumb thing.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#183

Post by bhagyeshsp »

wiieee wrote: post #178
fnordpiglet wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The answer is similar to: whose code is easier to untangle: human-A or human-B?

"Depends".

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#184

Post by WorldMaker »

dilyevsky wrote: post #132
kelnos wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME, it's faster and less frustrating to just write the code myself, if the goal is to get code to my quality standards.

Respectfully, unless someone is really really bad at articulating what the quality standards are or works with a very niche stack that is definitely not the case anymore with SOTA models

Respectfully, the current models are all trained on everyone else's legacy code as of roughly six months ago and largely always will be. If I'm doing my job right an LLM cannot meet my personal quality bar on its own because I will always need innovation and excellence they will never see and thus cannot deliver. I also think that training these tools on my personal quality bar is more work than just writing it myself.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#185

Post by sibeliuss »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #9

The thing is the code quality is still ultimately up to you Nothing stopping you from iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write

This is precisely why these types of articles don't make any sense to me, and strike me as case studies on human laziness. If you want good output, you'll review the output and iterate. If you want good foundations, you'll write them, and then later those foundations will prevent, to a very great degree, bad code from getting written by the LLM.

These articles frustrate me greatly. That said, the author's point about token cost is real, and a risk.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#186

Post by ookblah »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #148
ookblah wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

someone probably made this same argument against certain frameworks over the years and juniors still figured it out. we need to stop trying to babysit learning for hypothetical situations. the bar to "start" is lower and the bar to actually competency is higher now, juniors who want to actually learn instead of just pressing enter over and over again will do so regardless of whatever you do to "help" them.

It's not really a hypothetical. I work with one junior who's submitted an incorrect bugfix 3 times and counting; he seems genuinely incapable of processing the idea that there's a correctness issue he has to resolve, rather than a prompt engineering issue that will allow Claude to figure it out if only he asks in the right way.

that's not the tooling's fault i feel. i've used LLMs to help explore and debug issues, point me to the right documentation to investigate, etc. I WISH i had something like this 30 years ago.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#187

Post by sibeliuss »

cyanydeez wrote: post #11
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #9

The thing is the code quality is still ultimately up to you Nothing stopping you from iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write

Sure, but then it's not really saving you time is it.

It saves so much time! Think of the best find and replace and autocomplete and macro and every other possible super tool you use and roll everything into one. The design phase of any significant feature pales in comparison to all of the (now fully automated) tasks that you can just hand off to the agent to do nearly instantly and perfectly.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#188

Post by throwaway041207 »

zbentley wrote: post #143
monksy wrote: post #20

I kind of think this article misses the mark a little. There is skill loss from heavy AI use. But I want to acknowledge the awkward elephant in the room. AI Is making people too fast. I don't mean that a faster output is bad. It's a faster output and code rather than a full understanding and experience in producing the code. It's rewarding people who try to talk about business value rather than the people that are bu…

I don’t disagree with any of that, but I think the brutal truth is that the priority of most businesses was always that approximate, slipshod, business-driven development. The human engineering process was only coincidentally a check back against the worst outcomes of that philosophy, not intentionally one.

I certainly think that is true of the current moment, but where I think this is going is towards a model where the cost of human labor collapses, feature delivery slows (relative to the churn that is happening now), but becomes more predictable and less error prone (in terms of final delivery). I think that is the model that we see in manufacturing, and I think it's probably going to replicate in software engineering. New code (that a human didn't even look at, tbh) will be stress tested for correctness, progressively introduced and final delivery will be easy to forecast and most of the time will be delivered on time.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#189

Post by bigthymer »

ryandrake wrote: post #177
josephg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 syndr…

While prescription drug marketing to consumers is an issue in the US, I think the actual problem in this situation is people Googling their issue then coming to the doctor with the conclusion of their investigation instead of letting the doctor do the investigation themselves.
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