Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We put a coding agent in a while loop

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 317 posts

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#201

Post by broast »

VincentEvans wrote: post #12

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

> it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.

These are my favorite types of code bases to work on. The source of truth is the code. You have to read it and debug it to figure it out, and reconcile the actual behaviors with the desired or expected behaviors through your own product oriented thinking

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#202

Post by worldsayshi »

thyristan wrote: post #164
worldsayshi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prevailing counter narrative around vibe coding seems to be that "code output isn't the bottle neck, understanding the problem is". But shouldn't that make vibe coding a good tool for the tool belt? Use it to understand the outermost layer of the problem, then throw out the code and write a proper solution.

> [create prototype], then throw out the code and write a proper solution. Problem is, that in everyones' experience, this almost never happens. The prototype is declared "good enough, just needs a few small adjustments", rewrite is declared too expensive, too time-consuming. And crap goes to production.

Yes, that's how it is. And that is a separate problem. And it also shifts the narrative a bit more towards 'the bottleneck is writing good code'.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#203

Post by octodoctor »

lionkor wrote: post #158

I recently tried vibe-coding a pretty simple program. All I can say is that I'm horrified at people doing this. Not only did it produce extremely inadequate solutions (not for a lack of trying), but also these solutions were BARELY fulfilling the requirements, and nothing else. At one point, I gave it a scenario which demonstrated a common failure case, such an important one that it would have broken horribly in prod…

Yeah, I’ve run into that too. When you let the AI "drive" completely, it tends to patch symptoms instead of reasoning about the system. I wouldn’t trust it to autonomously fix production code either.

Where it does shine for me is in the grindy parts: refactoring, writing boilerplate, scaffolding new components, or even surfacing edge cases I hadn’t thought about. I’m building FreeDevTools, and I still do the design + final decision-making myself. The AI just helps me move faster across SEO, styling, bug-fixing, backend/frontend glue code, etc.

Basically, I treat it more like a junior pair programmer, useful for speed, but absolutely not a replacement for review, testing, or architectural thinking.

https://github.com/HexmosTech/FreeDevTools

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#204

Post by whs »

ghuntley wrote: post #179
whs wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote an MCP based on that technique - https://github.com/whs/mcp-chinesewall Basically to avoid the ambiguity of training LLM from unlicensed code, I use it to generate description of the code to another LLM trained from permissively licensed code. (There aren't any usable public domain models I've found) I use it in real world and it seems that the codegen model work 10-20% of the time (the description is not det…

Nice. Any chance you could put in some attributions and credits in your paper? https://orcid.org/0009-0007-3955-9994

I never read your work though (and still haven't since it's paywalled), I just discovered today that we independently discovered the same thing.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#205

Post by jmathai »

ceuk wrote: post #176
thyristan wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [create prototype], then throw out the code and write a proper solution. Problem is, that in everyones' experience, this almost never happens. The prototype is declared "good enough, just needs a few small adjustments", rewrite is declared too expensive, too time-consuming. And crap goes to production.

Watching was supposed to be a prototype become the production code is one of the most constant themes of my 20 year career

Software takes longer to develop than other parts of the org want to wait.

AI is emerging as a possible solution to this decades old problem.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#207

Post by camgunz »

worldsayshi wrote: post #157
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time. This will be the big counter to AI generated tools; at one point they become black boxes and the only thing people can do is to try and fix them or replace them altogether. Of course, in theory, AI tooling will only improve; today's vibe coded software that in some cases generate revenue can be fed into the models o…

The prevailing counter narrative around vibe coding seems to be that "code output isn't the bottle neck, understanding the problem is". But shouldn't that make vibe coding a good tool for the tool belt? Use it to understand the outermost layer of the problem, then throw out the code and write a proper solution.

Coding is how I build a sufficiently deep understanding of the problem space--there's no separating coding and understanding for me. I acknowledge there's different ways of working (and I imagine this is one of the reasons a lot of people think they get a lot more value out of LLMs than I do), but like, having Cursor crank code out for me actually slows me down. I have to read all the stuff it does so I can coach it into doing better, and also use its work to build a good mental model of the problem, and all that takes longer than writing the code myself.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#208

Post by ofjcihen »

torginus wrote: post #150
ofjcihen wrote: post #97

As a security professional who makes most of my money from helping companies recover from vibe coded tragedies this puts Looney Toons style dollar signs in my eyes. Please continue.

Since the entire concept of Vibe Coding existed for a grand total of 5 months, how do companies reach the level of saturation with vibe coding, that it's not only prevalent, but makes sense to specialize in helping them recover from it?

My guess is tons of small/medium sized companies were enamored with the speed and ease of use that LLMs promised and very quickly found solutions that “just worked”.

Also we don’t really specialize in it since that’s not something you would really do. It’s just that the usual vulnerabilities are more common AND compounded.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#209

Post by ofjcihen »

phito wrote: post #144
ofjcihen wrote: post #97

As a security professional who makes most of my money from helping companies recover from vibe coded tragedies this puts Looney Toons style dollar signs in my eyes. Please continue.

Are LLMs better or worse at security than a team full of fresh graduates?

Hard to say for a number of reasons but I can tell you what kind of teams we see.

College grads with no seniors or too few senior devs to oversee them tend to be the worst. Surprisingly, it seems that the worst of these is where the team is very enthusiastic about tech in general. I’ve wondered if it’s a desire to be the next Zuckerberg or maybe not having the massive failure everyone has eventually that makes you realize you aren’t bullet proof.

Experienced devs with too much work to do are common. Genuinely feel bad for these guys.

Off shore shops seem to now ship worse crap faster. Not only that but when one app has an issue you can usually assume they all have the same issue.

Also as a side note Tech focused companies are the most common followed by B2C companies. Manufacturing etc. are really rare for us to see and I think that may be something to do with reticence to adopt new patterns or tech.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#210

Post by zppln »

jmathai wrote: post #205
ceuk wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching was supposed to be a prototype become the production code is one of the most constant themes of my 20 year career

Software takes longer to develop than other parts of the org want to wait. AI is emerging as a possible solution to this decades old problem.

No, the org will still have to wait for the requirements, which is what they were waiting for all along.
Post reply on HN