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Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

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Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#211

Post by acedTrex »

spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

> The floor has been raised significantly as to what bad code can even look like

It's hard for me to disagree with this take more wow. LLM slop code is TERRIBLE and verbose.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#212

Post by ori_b »

Lessons for agentic swimming: What should we do when lead weights are cheap?

Also:

> It’s invigorating, rewarding, and deeply weird.

It's mind-numbing, infanialising, and deeply dehumanizing. Which, I suppose, is a valid description of the future silicon valley is building.

The remainder of the post is as vapid as the AI generating it.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#213

Post by achierius »

peab wrote: post #140
isaacaggrey wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood it in the spirit of “code is a liability not an asset.” Code still needs to be maintained, changed, etc whether that is by a human or LLM. In other words, just because more code can be produced quickly does not mean that it is cheap. edit: I’m maybe hearing your point is that LLMs may change that POV but I think that is TBD.

I don't really think that's accurate either, from a business POV. Software has been such a gold mine, exactly because the maintenance are minimal when you scale, compared to the revenue. The upfront costs are expensive, but once you have software built, in most cases it's relatively cheap to maintain

Things can provide value to a business while still acting as a liability -- that is to say, by virtue of their existence they cost you money, even if, when properly leveraged, they can be used as a tool to make more.

Consider a canonical loan: you get a pile of cash, but in exchange you need to make regular interest payments (plus, at some point pay back the principal, but this isn't strictly necessary -- e.g. governments used to issue perpetual bonds, which paid their coupons indefinitely). The analogy I would make with software is that the product has value, but the code you use to create it is a liability, in that it demands continuous maintenance and upkeep. Just as when you go shopping for a car loan, you look for one with the smallest interest rate -- if the debt itself were an asset, you would want more of it, which doesn't make sense. In the same way, it behooves a business to try and achieve its goals with a relatively small amount of code, not to create as much software as possible.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#215

Post by inquirerGeneral »

spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

[dead]

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#216

Post by noashavit »

I think there is a massive divide in the market between large enterprises and smaller org.

The large enterprises are their typically laggard self. Prioritizing governance over innovation.

Everyone else, at least in tech or tech adjacent, is building. Build vs buy is the conversation.

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#217

Post by worik »

rafterydj wrote: post #154
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap. Software to do what, though ?! Coding, maybe 10% of a developers job (Brooks "Silver Bullet" estimates 1/6), was never the bottleneck, and even if you automated that away entirely then you've only reduced development time by 10% (assuming you are not doing human code review etc). I would also argue that software development as a whole (not just the co…

+1 for any mention of Fred Brooks. I like your point about software as a whole not being a bottleneck. In the 1970s the hardware was co-evolving with business uses (it still is, but constraints were much more severe) leading to large headcounts on software projects that _absolutely_ had to work and _absolutely_ required uncommon expertise. Most people had no concept of a computer's capabilities, computer science was…

> Most people had no concept of a computer's capabilities, computer science was not as widely distributed.

I am not sure that has changed....

Re: Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

#219

Post by oliveralbertini »

banannaise wrote: post #163
spicyusername wrote: post #74

A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip. Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists. Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's con…

The ticket has subtle errors in its description that are only caught by someone experienced with the codebase. The code hides an exception behind an if-then-else that defaults to the most common state, which isn't caught until it breaks things for the 1% of users who don't have that state. The new feature quietly breaks a feature not covered by the acceptance tests. The documentation is four times as long and nobody…

Do you use Microsoft Copilot ?
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