21–30 of 136 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ask the AI to create a detailed spec according to a few simple requirements. Review the spec yourself and correct what you want changed. Then ask the AI to implement the spec. Each time you request something new, ask the AI to update the spec as well.
This so much more annoying and circuitous than writing code.
My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding.
And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application that I intend to open source. It's about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline. I'm doing 24x7 mutation testing on a dedicated box against the accounting engine and temporal systems. I even have specialized agents doing audits against Regulation Z (US banking law) criteria so the app models the required behavior of banks.
Most of my complaints about everything are nits, like the overly verbose and dense way LLMs communicate with me. Or their predisposition to add, add, and add more stuff when proper engineering practices are more often about subtraction (but I've built mitigation guardrails against a lot of that).
I tried, but I’m not sure I understand. The vibe tax is caused by the model trying to one-shot everything and doing so requires unnecessary tests? How are vibe coders training the model over months? Do you mean their sessions and preferences are being fed back into the RL?
Forgot where i saw it discussed; If you observe recent model benchmarks over the past year; the performance is slowly climbing, but if you divide by the token count; the score per token is dropping. The current trend in state-of-art LLM coding agents is giving more output, thinking longer and checking the results more to catch mistakes. Be it an economics inventive to make users burn through their quota or show incre…
I tried, but I’m not sure I understand. The vibe tax is caused by the model trying to one-shot everything and doing so requires unnecessary tests? How are vibe coders training the model over months? Do you mean their sessions and preferences are being fed back into the RL?
Forgot where i saw it discussed; If you observe recent model benchmarks over the past year; the performance is slowly climbing, but if you divide by the token count; the score per token is dropping. The current trend in state-of-art LLM coding agents is giving more output, thinking longer and checking the results more to catch mistakes. Be it an economics inventive to make users burn through their quota or show incre…
I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding. And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application t…
I feel this, yes. In effect, I’ve always wanted a pair programmer agent, not a zero to one programming agent. Unfortunately models these days are mostly of the latter kind and it has caused a major disruption in the way I work. I’d much rather appreciate a small model making fast and specific edits that I ask if it, rather than ingesting 20 files to make changes, and then starting to write tests, etc.
The software has a plugin API. I asked Muse Glimmer to recommend a plugin — it found one but I tested it and it didn't work for unclear reasons (among other things the software installed version is old, the plugin older). I then asked it to outline how to implement a simple word filter, it gave me an overview of some hooks that looked right from dim-and-distant-past recollection of reading the docs when I installed it. I asked it some questions, it did the research.
I then set it off generating the skeleton of a filter plugin, went to the shops to buy food, came back and worked through filling it in and finishing it off. There was a bug. It found the solution.
It's only about 100 lines of code but it is a random old webapp and it had to look stuff up to finish it, and I think it did rather well. All on my Mac.
I am deeply cynical of the one-shot code, "nobody codes anymore" hype culture idea and that distaste put me off AI and agentic coding for ages. Like you, I want an assistant but as a freelancer I have to stay in control. I have no interest in the "just specify loops" BS and it will be bad for my business anyway.
I worry about code that I don't have a good working overivew of, and I worry that I might forget what I have done (I have pretty bad issues with focus and memory). But in this particular case, I don't really care if I forget, because there's documented code and I have no intention of specialising in this app. So it was a nice little test case.
I also don't really want to sit around waiting for Qwen 3.8 27B on this machine. Muse Glimmer is fine, actually. Gets to the solution as quickly as Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B.
This gives me a little hope that local AI will give me the sort of responsive developer sidekick I actually want.
I feel this, yes. In effect, I’ve always wanted a pair programmer agent, not a zero to one programming agent. Unfortunately models these days are mostly of the latter kind and it has caused a major disruption in the way I work. I’d much rather appreciate a small model making fast and specific edits that I ask if it, rather than ingesting 20 files to make changes, and then starting to write tests, etc.
I have found what works well is to modularise the code as much as possible and get an agent to work within a very limited scope. Break everything down well using SRP with well defined interfaces and let the agent work on small problems. Then when it shits the bed, there’s a smaller blast radius and you can strip back and try again. I think seasoned developers, over time, learn how to work a code base and design compo…
I definitely prefer (c). But I get why (b) can feel necessary. If your competition is using (b) there can be pressure to do the same just to keep up.
I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding. And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application t…
How in the world do you need 30k LOC for your CI/CD??
There's a reason why we talk about software development lifecycle, design, architecture, testing ... It's because it's been the most reliable way to build and ship software. We shouldn't expect discard this and expect agents to perform well outside of this.
I'm treating LLM agents as junior devs who happen to have vast knowledge of software engineering. As their team leader i make them go through planning, implementation, bug sweeping cycles using strict workflows. And it works quite well, i've been working on several large projects (1M+ LOC java,typescript,c/c++) and by any measure the projects are healthy. Sure the code isn't that beautiful, sure i'd have written things differently but it's pretty good nonetheless.
Shameless plug here: i've been also working on https://kodfactory.com, the code factory i've built to work on these large projects with workflows, reviews, etc ... I'm cleaning things up to open source it later.
(If you give claude an inch these days it'll just steamroll through a whole program of work without checking what it should be doing - a kind of overenthusiastic pull towards the first draft that is often detrimental and definitely wastes tokens, and even for very basic tasks it's using many more tokens than it should because it's doing this full belt and braces thing for everything, just in case you're an idiot).
But also... it's something you can easily reign in if you want to.