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Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

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Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#21

Post by plagiarist »

autoexec wrote: post #16
mark242 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

Companies aren't investing in AI because they want to solve the problem of semicolon placement. They want AI to solve problems and come up with solutions. Then they want to fire most of their programmers and force the rest to do nothing but check over and fix the slop their marketing departments are churning out.

I don't know why they'd stop at most programmers instead of all programmers. And the marketing department will also be AI. Companies want AI to remove the need for any labor so they can more directly gain money based on already having money.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#22

Post by freetime2 »

The more immediate uncomfortable truth for me is that my company is requiring all developers to use LLMs, and laying off developers who won't make the switch. I'm not sure that "LLM-based AI coding agents have no place now, or ever, in generating production code for any software I build professionally" is a decision that most of us will have a choice in.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#23

Post by jason-festa »

autoexec wrote: post #16
mark242 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

Companies aren't investing in AI because they want to solve the problem of semicolon placement. They want AI to solve problems and come up with solutions. Then they want to fire most of their programmers and force the rest to do nothing but check over and fix the slop their marketing departments are churning out.

[dead]

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#24

Post by johnfn »

The section on "artificially low costs" does not make a lot of sense to me. If anything I feel like the costs are inflated for the frontier models, not "artificially low". Easy proof: GLM-5 costs about 1/10 as much as Opus. I'm not going to tell you it's as good as Opus 4.6 -- it's not -- but it performs comparably to where frontier models were 6 months ago. (It's on par with Sonnet 4.5 on leaderboards, though in practice it's probably closer to Sonnet 4.0.)

If I can switch to an open source model today, run it myself, and spend 1/10 as much as Opus, and get to about where frontier models were 6 months ago, fear-mongering about how we'll have to weather "orders-of-magnitude price hikes" and arguing that that one shouldn't even bother to learn how to use AI at all seems disconnected from reality. Who cares about the "shady accounting" OpenAI is doing, or that AI labs are "wildly unprofitable"? I can run GLM 5 right now, forever, for cheap.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#27

Post by Avicebron »

plagiarist wrote: post #21
autoexec wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies aren't investing in AI because they want to solve the problem of semicolon placement. They want AI to solve problems and come up with solutions. Then they want to fire most of their programmers and force the rest to do nothing but check over and fix the slop their marketing departments are churning out.

I don't know why they'd stop at most programmers instead of all programmers. And the marketing department will also be AI. Companies want AI to remove the need for any labor so they can more directly gain money based on already having money.

> directly gain money based on already having money.

I'm stealing this.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#28

Post by JohnMakin »

palmotea wrote: post #14
mark242 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

>> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. > Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. Aren't the coding agents supposed to be doing that too? You give them the problem, they code up a solution, then the engineer is left with the review it to see if it's good enough. > The fun in the job is not knowing…

Eh, that’s not at all how I do it. I like to design the architecture and spec and let them implement the code. That is a fun skill to exercise. Sometimes I give a little more leeway in letting them decide how to implement, but that can go off the rails.

imho “tell them what you want and let them come up with a solution” is a really naive way to use these tools nearly guaranteed to end up with slopware.

the more up front design I’ve given thought to, they are usually very accurate in delivering to the point I dont need to spend very much time reviewing at all. and, this is a step I would have had to do anyway if doing it by hand, so it feels natural, and results in far more correct code more often than I could have on my own, and allows multitasking several projects at once, which would have been impossible before.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#29

Post by lelanthran »

mark242 wrote: post #19
lelanthran wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. You don't need to be a software engineer to do that.

Except you kind of do -- understanding data structures, understanding software engineering concepts, all of the things that you learn as a good engineer, those are ways that you help guide the LLM in its work.

> Except you kind of do -- understanding data structures, understanding software engineering concepts, all of the things that you learn as a good engineer,

How do you learn that without programming?

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#30

Post by rbalicki »

The skill atrophy point strikes me as tenuous at best. Obviously, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I find myself able to work on projects of greater complexity than I would have been able to otherwise. 90% of my time is spent going back and forth on Markdown files, discussing the architecture, trade-offs, etc. I don't think it's necessarily impossible to use all this newfound power to ship more sloppier code. It's clearly possible to use all this newfound power to ship better code too.
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