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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?

#191

Post by butlike »

ikrenji wrote: post #188
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

you can't continue shipping code the same way pre-LLM vs post-LLM and expecting a huge speed gain. the trick is abandoning the old models and bottlenecks and embracing the new possibilities enabled by LLMs. requires a high trust environment

A hard dependency like that doesn't seem flexible. There's no such thing as a high-trust environment, abstractly.

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

#192

Post by ikrenji »

RealityVoid wrote: post #189
ikrenji wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can't continue shipping code the same way pre-LLM vs post-LLM and expecting a huge speed gain. the trick is abandoning the old models and bottlenecks and embracing the new possibilities enabled by LLMs. requires a high trust environment

High... Ugh, trust... In the... LLM? Hah!

in the employees...

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

#193

Post by ikrenji »

butlike wrote: post #191
ikrenji wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can't continue shipping code the same way pre-LLM vs post-LLM and expecting a huge speed gain. the trick is abandoning the old models and bottlenecks and embracing the new possibilities enabled by LLMs. requires a high trust environment

A hard dependency like that doesn't seem flexible. There's no such thing as a high-trust environment, abstractly.

there are workplaces that trust their employees to do the right thing to higher and lesser level. places that empower the employees the most will see the highest gains from LLMs

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

#194

Post by RealityVoid »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #109
xantronix wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the drudgery of programming Is programming supposed to suck all the time? Am I doing it wrong? I mean yeah, sure, it sucks sometimes, but overcoming that "suck" is where I feel progress and growth. If we decide to optimise that away...What the fuck am I doing here? No offence to managers, but if everybody is a manager, is anybody?

Feels kind of like the problem of everybody wanting to be an entrepreneur in the 2010s. Just led to people basically trying to get paid to be middleman companies skimming from others that don’t really need them, or worse, selling supplements and life coaching or whatever on social media and other grifts.

Bingo! Nobody wants to build actual stuff. They all want to be intermediaries.

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

#195

Post by skydhash »

philwelch wrote: post #171
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The sibling comment to yours (by rafterydj) makes a good point that the surgical team is necessary, but we have eliminated the positions and put the roles on the same person. It’s like the writer being the subject expert, the reviewer, the editor,… which we all knows leads to mediocre work.

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

#196

Post by fernandotakai »

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.

>You call someone an author when they use a ghostwriter.

i don't know about you, but i absolutely don't. either you write the book yourself or you are not the author.

as kendrick lamar wrote:

I can dig rappin', but a rapper with a ghostwriter?

What the fuck happened? (Oh no)

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

#197

Post by RealityVoid »

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…

I think this is the way. Human-machine co-design worked great for me so far. Hell, even the test writing alone is great, because I can have more confidence in my code. And test writing was mostly drudgery. On the other hand, you _must_ have a good mental model of the thing in your head else this will not work. And it's much easier to believe you have it and not really have it if you don't engage with the codebase.

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

#198

Post by fernandotakai »

satvikpendem wrote: post #145
consp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the entire market in Europe it is also down but that is not due to "AI" but because they are easiest to fire with least consequences. There is a global recession looming, despite Wall Street saying otherwise.

Europe is easiest to fire? I would've thought the opposite.

depends on the country, i would guess.

but firing because "ai makes us more productive" is basically impossible in most eu countries.

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

#199

Post by skydhash »

chorsestudios wrote: post #177
banannaise wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Conciseness is variable. Sometines a paragraph is enough, some other tome you need multiple chapters and a glossary to get the point accross. 4x too long may be 4 paragraphs in the first case and a 400 pages book in the second case.

Adding a rule like yours is not the solution.

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

#200

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

ikrenji wrote: post #188
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

you can't continue shipping code the same way pre-LLM vs post-LLM and expecting a huge speed gain. the trick is abandoning the old models and bottlenecks and embracing the new possibilities enabled by LLMs. requires a high trust environment

So, get rid of the marketing department, get rid of business owners, agile, budgets, and everything that is stopping developers from creating their self-conceived vibe-coded creations as fast as they can ?
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