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Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

blog.alaindichiappari.dev

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Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#221

Post by pragmatic »

mark242 wrote: post #215
rglover wrote: post #139

A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code). The hubris around AI is goi…

I would argue that it's going to be the opposite. At re:Invent, one of the popular sessions was in creating a trio of SRE agents, one of which did nothing but read logs and report errors, one of which did analysis of the errors and triaged and proposed fixes, and one to do the work and submit PRs to your repo. Then, as part of the session, you would artificially introduce a bug into the system, then run into the bug…

Now run that loop 1000 times.

What does the code /system look like.

It is going to be more like evolution (fit to environment) than engineering (fit to purpose).

It will be fascinating to watch nonetheless.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#223

Post by cruffle_duffle »

goosejuice wrote: post #124
bvan wrote: post #109

Intellectual surrender is exactly the risk I fear with coding agents. Will the next generation of software ‘developers’ still know how to code? Seems coding agents are in a way taking us further from understanding the machine, just like frameworks have in the past.

Software has always been about abstraction. This one, in a way, is the ultimate abstraction. However it turns out that LLMs are a pretty powerful learning tool. One just needs the discipline to use it.

> This one, in a way, is the ultimate abstraction.

Is that really true though? I hear the Mythical Man Month "no silver bullet" in my head.... It's definitely a hell of an abstraction, but I'm not sure it's the "ultimate" either. There is still essential complexity to deal with.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#224

Post by pragmatic »

drcode wrote: post #205
rglover wrote: post #139

A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code). The hubris around AI is goi…

I'm no fan of AI in terms of its long term consequences, but being able to "just do things" with the aid of AI tools, diving head first into the most difficult programming projects, is going to improve the human programming skills worldwide to levels never before imaginable

How would it improve skills?

Does driving a car improve your running speed?

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#225

Post by finebalance »

pragmatic wrote: post #221
mark242 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that it's going to be the opposite. At re:Invent, one of the popular sessions was in creating a trio of SRE agents, one of which did nothing but read logs and report errors, one of which did analysis of the errors and triaged and proposed fixes, and one to do the work and submit PRs to your repo. Then, as part of the session, you would artificially introduce a bug into the system, then run into the bug…

Now run that loop 1000 times. What does the code /system look like. It is going to be more like evolution (fit to environment) than engineering (fit to purpose). It will be fascinating to watch nonetheless.

"evolution (fit to environment) than engineering (fit to purpose)."

Oh, I absolutely love this lens.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#226

Post by notatoad »

this is totally backwards to how i've been using agents.

the thing that an agent is really really good at is overcoming the initial load of using a new framework or library. i know, at some level, that using other people's code is going to save me trouble down the road, but there's an initial load to learn how to integrate with it, how to use it, and how to map the way the framework authors think to the way i think and the way my project needs to work. there's always the temptation to just build from scratch instead because it's initially quicker and easier.

letting the AI figure that out, and do the first initial steps of getting the framework to accomplish the task i need, produces a product that is better than what either the AI or i would produce without the framework, and it creates a product that i can then read, understand, and work on. letting the AI go from scratch invariably produces code that i don't want to work with myself.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#227

Post by Dfiesl »

GoatInGrey wrote: post #173
ipsento606 wrote: post #115

> Software engineers are scared of designing things themselves. When I use a framework, it's because I believe that the designers of that framework are i) probably better at software engineering than I am, and ii) have encountered all sorts of problems and scaling issues (both in terms of usage and actual codebase size) that I haven't encountered yet, and have designed the framework to ameliorate those problems. Thos…

To be blunt, I think it's a form of mania that drives someone to reject human-written code in favor of LLM-generated code. Every time I read writing from this perspective that exceeds a paragraph, I quickly realize the article itself was written by an LLM. When they automate this much writing, it makes me wonder how much of their own reading they automate away too. The below captures this perfectly. The author is try…

I think the bit you quoted is a tie in with an earlier bit:

“ I can be the architect without the wearing act of laying every single brick and spreading the mortar. I can design the dress without the act of cutting and sewing each individual piece of fabric”

To me, this text doesn’t read as being entirely written by an LLM, there is definitely an air of LLM about it though, so maybe the first draft was.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#228

Post by goostavos »

MrDarcy wrote: post #187
rglover wrote: post #139

A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code). The hubris around AI is goi…

This comment ignores the key insight of the article. Design is what matters most now. Design is the difference between vibe coding and software engineering. Given a good design, software engineers today are 100x more productive. What they produce is high quality due to the design. Production is fast and cheap due to the agents. You are correct, there will be a reckoning for large scale systems which are vibe coded. T…

>software engineers today are 100x more productive

Somebody needs to explain to my lying eyes where these 100xers are hiding. They seem to live in comments on the internet, but I'm not seeing the teams around me increase their output by two orders of magnitude.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#229

Post by markus_zhang »

rglover wrote: post #139

A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code). The hubris around AI is goi…

But by then many of us are already starved. That’s why I always said that engineers should NOT integrate AI with internal data.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#230

Post by skybrian »

pragmatic wrote: post #221
mark242 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that it's going to be the opposite. At re:Invent, one of the popular sessions was in creating a trio of SRE agents, one of which did nothing but read logs and report errors, one of which did analysis of the errors and triaged and proposed fixes, and one to do the work and submit PRs to your repo. Then, as part of the session, you would artificially introduce a bug into the system, then run into the bug…

Now run that loop 1000 times. What does the code /system look like. It is going to be more like evolution (fit to environment) than engineering (fit to purpose). It will be fascinating to watch nonetheless.

Sure, if all you ask it to do is fix bugs. You can also ask it to work on code health things like better organization, better testing, finding interesting invariants and enforcing them, and so on.

It's up to you what you want to prioritize.

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