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Coding agents have crossed a chasm

blog.singleton.io

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Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#21

Post by muglug »

nikcub wrote: post #14
muglug wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely — but I also think there’s a strong resistance to managers saying “AI is good, really”. The experience of long-term software engineers (e.g. antirez) who don’t have a horse in the AI race tends to line up much better with my own. Also really like this one: https://diwank.space/field-notes-from-shipping-real-code-wit...

~~Counter~~ add to that - Armin Ronacher[0] (Flask, Sentry et al.), Charlie Marsh[1] (ruff, uv) and Jarred Sumner[2] (Bun) amongst others are tweeting extensively about their positive experiences with llm driven development. My experience matches theirs - Claude Code is absolutely phenomenal, as is the Cursor tab completion model and the new memory feature. [0] https://x.com/mitsuhiko [1] https://x.com/charliermarsh…

Not a counter — antirez is posting positive things too.

Charlie Marsh seems to have much better luck writing Rust with Claude than I have. Claude has been great for TypeScript changes and build scripts but lousy when it comes to stuff like Rust borrowing

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#22

Post by blactuary »

reustle wrote: post #18
imiric wrote: post #17

I'm personally still in the "smarter autocomplete" phase when it comes to LLMs, as I don't trust the vibe-coded "agents" and the outputs they produce to control my computer. But that aside, this part stood out to me: > I don’t even look at the code anymore - I describe what I want to Claude Code, test the result, make some minor tweaks with the AI and if it’s not good enough, I start over with a slightly different in…

Just remember, you can continue to do artisanal programming as a hobby or for your own projects. But if you have an employer, they're paying you for functional and secure features, not lines of code.

He's quoting someone saying they don't even look at the code and you're saying "functional and secure"?

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#23

Post by emeril »

kragen wrote: post #11
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long-term software engineers do have an anti-horse in the AI race - a lot of us eventually could be replaced by a coding agent.

Most of us have been replaced by Microsoft Excel already though. Or by a compiler.

very true - for many tasks excel is enough, better, and faster

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#24

Post by nikcub »

muglug wrote: post #21
nikcub wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~~Counter~~ add to that - Armin Ronacher[0] (Flask, Sentry et al.), Charlie Marsh[1] (ruff, uv) and Jarred Sumner[2] (Bun) amongst others are tweeting extensively about their positive experiences with llm driven development. My experience matches theirs - Claude Code is absolutely phenomenal, as is the Cursor tab completion model and the new memory feature. [0] https://x.com/mitsuhiko [1] https://x.com/charliermarsh…

Not a counter — antirez is posting positive things too. Charlie Marsh seems to have much better luck writing Rust with Claude than I have. Claude has been great for TypeScript changes and build scripts but lousy when it comes to stuff like Rust borrowing

Apologies I misread! Updated.

I'll add - they do seem to do better with Go and Typescript (particularly Next and React) and are somewhat good with Python (although you need a clean project structure with nothing magic in it).

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#25

Post by emmanueloga_ »

dps wrote: post #3
muglug wrote: post #2

I agree they’re better but author should add add “Disclaimer: I’m the CEO of a company that sells agents as a service” at the top of and article promoting said agents.

Author of the piece here :-). We are not building coding agents and focused on quite different stuff… I am just trying to share my personal experience as a software person!

Took me a while to find this [1]: "We’re building the next-gen operating system for AI agents."

--

1: https://sdsa.ai/

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#26

Post by mgarfias »

When I use an LLM for (much of anything) I always feel like that scene in the first Iron Man movie where Stark is trying to build stuff with the robot and it almost, but doesn't quite, do what he wants, and then screws something all the way up

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#27

Post by nunez »

> For personal tools, I’ve completely shifted my approach. *I don’t even look at the code anymore - I describe what I want to Claude Code, test the result, make some minor tweaks with the AI and if it’s not good enough, I start over with a slightly different initial prompt. The iteration cycle is so fast that it’s often quicker to start over than trying to debug or modify the generated code myself.* This has unlocked a level of creative freedom where I can build small utilities and experiments without the usual friction of implementation details. Want a quick script to reorganize some photos? Done. Need a little web scraper for some project? Easy. The mental overhead of “is this worth building?” has basically disappeared for small tools. I do wish Claude Code had a mode where it could work more autonomously - right now it still requires more hands-on attention than I’d like - but even with that limitation, the productivity gains are wild.

So I suppose the chasm is that actually doing programming is dead, or quickly dying, and if that's the thing you actually enjoyed doing, then tough luck.

This era sucks. The suits have finally won.

(emphasis mine)

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#28

Post by nunez »

reustle wrote: post #18
imiric wrote: post #17

I'm personally still in the "smarter autocomplete" phase when it comes to LLMs, as I don't trust the vibe-coded "agents" and the outputs they produce to control my computer. But that aside, this part stood out to me: > I don’t even look at the code anymore - I describe what I want to Claude Code, test the result, make some minor tweaks with the AI and if it’s not good enough, I start over with a slightly different in…

Just remember, you can continue to do artisanal programming as a hobby or for your own projects. But if you have an employer, they're paying you for functional and secure features, not lines of code.

Exactly what the execs want; a valid excuse to reduce entire engineering departments to five people in a closet and scores of underpaid offshored people vibe coding all the things.

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#29

Post by tuatoru »

nunez wrote: post #27

> For personal tools, I’ve completely shifted my approach. *I don’t even look at the code anymore - I describe what I want to Claude Code, test the result, make some minor tweaks with the AI and if it’s not good enough, I start over with a slightly different initial prompt. The iteration cycle is so fast that it’s often quicker to start over than trying to debug or modify the generated code myself.* This has unlocked…

I'm sure there will be a market for artisanal, hand-crafted code.

If not, just do it for yourself.

Re: Coding agents have crossed a chasm

#30

Post by voidr »

> “We’re entering an era of untrustable code everywhere” - This assumes AI-generated code is inherently less trustworthy than human-written code, which isn’t obviously true.

It's not true if your humans are on controlled substances all the time, it is true if we are talking about real humans.

I've been testing coding agents on real code and I can say without a doubt that they make worse mistakes than humans.

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