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Eight more months of agents

crawshaw.io

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Re: Eight more months of agents

#211

Post by giancarlostoro »

habinero wrote: post #190
giancarlostoro wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we do, you don't just start a brand new web project and spit out CORS rules, authentication schemes, roles, etc in one sitting do you? Are you an AI?

I actually do build all of those things before standing something up in prod. Not doing that is insane. Literally every web framework has reasonable defaults baked in. Any competent tech company will have canned ways to do all of those things that have already been reviewed and vetted

I never said anything about before hitting production, I said do you build everything in one shot when you start a brand new project, in one sitting.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#212

Post by giancarlostoro »

blibble wrote: post #62
giancarlostoro wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we do, you don't just start a brand new web project and spit out CORS rules, authentication schemes, roles, etc in one sitting do you? Are you an AI?

> are you an AI? no, I'm a competent engineer maybe you've not worked with any

So let me get this straight, you get instructed to build an Instagram clone, and you sit down and one shot code every single feature for the project? My point is about in one sitting, doing EVERYTHING all at once, without pausing, without standing up, without breaks. I don't know about you but people who tend to rush code out make just as many if not worse mistakes than AI does.

I've worked with many competent engineers and have built things people couldn't even google help for before AI existed, and that surpassed mine and my teams expectations both solo and in a team setting, none of them were done in one sitting, which is what you're suggesting. Everything is planned out, and done piecemeal.

For the record, I can one shot an AI model to do all of those things, with all the detail they need and get similar output as if I gave a human all those tasks, I know because I've built the exact tooling to loop AI around the same processes competent developers use, and it still can do all of it in record time.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#213

Post by ncruces »

mattmanser wrote: post #122
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #117

Local models are decent now. Qwen3 coder is pretty good and decent speed. I use smaller models (qwen2.5:1.5b) with keyboard shortcuts and speech to text to ask for man page entries, and get 'em back faster than my internet connection and a "robust" frontier model does. And web search/RAG hides a multitude of sins. "Using anything other than the frontier models is actively harmful" - so how come I'm getting solid resu…

Have you used the frontier models recently? It's hard to communicate the difference the last 6 months has seen. We're at the point where copilot is irrelevant. Your way of working is irrelevant. Because that's not how you interact with coding AIs anymore, you're chatting with them about the code outside the IDE.

I have.

Just this month I've burned through 80% of my Copilot quota of Claude Opus 4.6 in a couple of days to get it to help me with a silly hobby project: https://github.com/ncruces/dbldbl

It did help. The project had been sitting for 3 years without trig and hyperbolic trig, and in a couple days of spare time I'm adding it. Some of it through rubber ducking chat and/or algorithmic papers review (give me formulas, I'll do it), some through agent mode (give me code).

But if you review the PR written in agent mode, the model still lies to my face, in trivial but hard to verify ways. Like adding tests that say cosh(1) is this number at that OEIS link, and both the number and the OEIS link are wrong, but obviously tests pass because it's a lie.

I'm not trying to bash the tech. I use it at work in limited but helpful ways, and use hobby stuff like this as a testbed precisely to try to figure out what they're good at in a low stakes setting.

But you trust the plausibly looking output of these things at your own peril.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#214

Post by wongarsu »

entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

At my $work this manifests as more backlog items being ticked off, more one-off internal tooling, features (and tools) getting more bells-and-whistles and much more elaborate UI. Also some long-standing bugs being fixed by claude code.

Headline features aren't much faster. You still need to gather requirements, design a good architecture, talk with stakeholders, test your implementation, gather feedback, etc. Speeding up the actual coding can only move the needle so much.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#215

Post by duggan »

lapcat wrote: post #171
duggan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the person you asked, but my interpretation of “left in the dust” here (not a phrasing I particularly agree with) would be the same way iOS development took off in the 2010s. There was a land rush to create apps. Basic stuff like the flash light, todo lists, etc, were created and found a huge audience. Development studios were established, people became very successful out of it. I think the same thing will happe…

I’m not sure your analogy is applicable here. The introduction of the App Store did not increase developer productivity per se. If anything, it decreased developer productivity, because unless you were already already a Mac developer, you had to learn a programming language you've never used, Objective-C, (now it's largely Swift, but that's still mainly used only on Apple platforms) and a brand new Apple-specific API…

My take is more optimistic.

I think it will make prototyping and MVP more accessible to a wider range of people than before. This goes all the way from people who don't know how to code up to people who know very well how to code, but don't have the free time/energy to pursue every idea.

Project activation energy decreases. I think this is a net positive, as it allows more and different things to be started. I'm sure some think it's a net negative for the same reasons. If you're a developer selling the same knowledge and capacity you sold ten years ago things will change. But that was always the case.

My comparison to iOS was about the market opportunity, and the opportunity for entrepreneurship. It's not magic, not yet anyway. This is the time to go start a company, or build every weird idea that you were never going to get around to.

There are so many opportunities to create software and companies, we're not running out of those just because it's faster to generate some of the code.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#216

Post by jmull »

Regarding the shift away from time spent on agriculture over the last century or so..

> That was a net benefit to the world, that we all don't have to work to eat.

I’m pretty sure most all of us are still working to have food to eat and shelter for ourselves and our families.

Also, while the on-going industrial and technological revolution has certainly brought benefits, it’s an open question as to whether it will turn out to be a net benefit. There’s a large-scale tragedy of the commons experiment playing out and it’s hard to say what the result will be.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#217

Post by sowbug »

lapcat wrote: post #171
duggan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the person you asked, but my interpretation of “left in the dust” here (not a phrasing I particularly agree with) would be the same way iOS development took off in the 2010s. There was a land rush to create apps. Basic stuff like the flash light, todo lists, etc, were created and found a huge audience. Development studios were established, people became very successful out of it. I think the same thing will happe…

I’m not sure your analogy is applicable here. The introduction of the App Store did not increase developer productivity per se. If anything, it decreased developer productivity, because unless you were already already a Mac developer, you had to learn a programming language you've never used, Objective-C, (now it's largely Swift, but that's still mainly used only on Apple platforms) and a brand new Apple-specific API…

I didn't read the comment as such a direct analogy. It was more recalling a lesson of history that maybe doesn't repeat but probably will rhyme.

The App Store reshuffled the deck. Some people recognized that and took advantage of the decalcification. Some of them did well.

You've recognized some implications of the reshuffle that's currently underway. Maybe you're right that there's a bias toward the LLM vendors. But among all of it, is there a niche you can exploit?

Re: Eight more months of agents

#218

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

mattmanser wrote: post #122
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #117

Local models are decent now. Qwen3 coder is pretty good and decent speed. I use smaller models (qwen2.5:1.5b) with keyboard shortcuts and speech to text to ask for man page entries, and get 'em back faster than my internet connection and a "robust" frontier model does. And web search/RAG hides a multitude of sins. "Using anything other than the frontier models is actively harmful" - so how come I'm getting solid resu…

Have you used the frontier models recently? It's hard to communicate the difference the last 6 months has seen. We're at the point where copilot is irrelevant. Your way of working is irrelevant. Because that's not how you interact with coding AIs anymore, you're chatting with them about the code outside the IDE.

Just to be clear: I mean Copilot CLI. I had used the IDE, and it was terrible; I tried the CLI, and for some reason it was much better. I explain carefully what I want, and it iterates until it's done, quickly, on cheap models.

If you check the docs, smaller, faster, older models are recommended for 'lightweight' coding. There's several reasons for this. 1) a smaller model doesn't have as good deep reasoning, so it works okay for a simple ask. 2) small context, small task, small model can produce better results than big context, big task, big model. The lost-in-the-middle problem is still unsolved, leading to mistakes that get worse with big context, and longer runs exacerbate issues. So small context/task that ends and starts a new loop (with planning & learning) ends up working really well and quickly.

There's a difference between tasks and problem-solving, though. For difficult problems, you want a frontier reasoning model.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#219

Post by lapcat »

duggan wrote: post #215
lapcat wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure your analogy is applicable here. The introduction of the App Store did not increase developer productivity per se. If anything, it decreased developer productivity, because unless you were already already a Mac developer, you had to learn a programming language you've never used, Objective-C, (now it's largely Swift, but that's still mainly used only on Apple platforms) and a brand new Apple-specific API…

My take is more optimistic. I think it will make prototyping and MVP more accessible to a wider range of people than before. This goes all the way from people who don't know how to code up to people who know very well how to code, but don't have the free time/energy to pursue every idea. Project activation energy decreases. I think this is a net positive, as it allows more and different things to be started. I'm sure…

What you just said seems reasonable. However, what the earlier commenter said, which led to this subthread, seems unreasonable: those people unwilling to try the tools "are absolutely going to get left in the dust."

Returning to the iOS analogy, though, there was only a short period of time in history when a random developer with a flashlight or fart app could become successful in the App Store. Nowadays, such a new app would flop, if Apple even allowed it, as you admitted: "You can still start as an iOS developer today, but the opportunity is different." The software market in general is not new. There are already a huge number of competitors. Thus, when you say, "This is the time to go start a company, or build every weird idea that you were never going to get around to," it's unclear why this would be the case. Perhaps the barrier to entry for competitors has been lowered, yet the competition is as fierce as ever (unlike in the early App Store).

In any case, there's a huge difference between "the barrier to entry has been lowered" and "those who don't use LLMs will be left in the dust". I think the latter is ridiculous.

Where are the original flashlight and fart app developers now? Hopefully they made enough money to last a lifetime, otherwise they're back in the same boat as everyone else.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#220

Post by overfeed »

sdoering wrote: post #140
entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

Quite a few - and I know I am only speaking for myself - live on my different computers. I created a few CLI tools that make my life and that of my agent smoother sailing for information retrieval. I created, inspired by a blog post, a digital personal assistant, that really enables me to better juggle different work contexts as well as different projects within these work contexts. I created a platform for a virtual…

> Quite a few - and I know I am only speaking for myself - live on my different computers

I use AI/agents in quite similar ways, and even rekindled multiple personal projects that had stalled. However, to borrow OPs parlance, these are not "houses" - more like sheds and tree-houses. They are fun and useful, but not moving the needle on housing stock supply, so to speak.

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