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Eight more months of agents

crawshaw.io

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Re: Eight more months of agents

#231

Post by anthuswilliams »

pjc50 wrote: post #181
anthuswilliams wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very much looking forward to this shift. It is SO MUCH more pro-consumer than the existing SaaS model. Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation. It feels like every time I ask for programmatic access to SaaS tools in order to simplify a workflow, I get stuck in endless meetings with product managers trying to "understan…

> Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation OK, but: that's an economic situation. > so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on. Right, so there's less profit in it. To me it seems this will make the market more adversarial, not less. Increasing amounts of effort will be expended t…

Maybe. Or maybe services will switch to charging per API call or whatever instead of monthly or per-seat. Who can predict the future?

I mean, services _could_ make it harder to use LLMs to interact with them, but if agents are popular enough they might see customers start to revolt over it.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#232

Post by 8note »

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?

do you have the right expectations?

rather than new stuff for everyone to use, the future could easily be everyone building their own bespoke tools for their own problems.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#234

Post by girvo »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #210
girvo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I really do, because this has been a solved problem for a while. Also it’s necessary to get right because retro fitting it later is a pain.

So if you're going to build a massive application say, YouTube, Facebook or Instagram you're going to sit down, and write out every template, db model, controller, view model, etc in one single sitting for the entire application? No bathroom breaks, no lunch, no "I'll finish that part tomorrow" you do it ALL in one sitting? Because you will miss something, and that's my point, nobody gets their first crack at a green…

No, the AI writes far less secure code than I do to start, even with the SotA models and careful prompting/detailed plans.

You’ve moved the goalposts so far that you’re now talking about a different game altogether.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#235

Post by girvo »

ares623 wrote: post #130
girvo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m baffled why people are surprised that senior+ engineers who are being told in one breath they will be replaced by this tool and also they MUST use this tool to make it better to replace them aren’t happy about it or want to use it willingly. I also find it wild how we’re sleepwalking into this, but I’m also part of the problem and using these things too.

If you're forced to use it by company mandate then that's fine. If you're not forced and still use it being fully aware, then I wish you well.

I’m forced to yes. It’s tracked.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#236

Post by jofla_net »

amarble wrote: post #193
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?

This weekend I tried what I'd call a medium scale agentic coding project[0], following what Anthropic demonstrated last week autonomously building a C-compiler [1]. Bottom line is, it's possible to make demos that look good, but it really doesn't work well enough to build software you would actually use. This naturally lends itself to the "everybody is taking about how great it is but nobody is building anything real…

Thank you for doing this.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#237

Post by parliament32 »

amarble wrote: post #193
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?

This weekend I tried what I'd call a medium scale agentic coding project[0], following what Anthropic demonstrated last week autonomously building a C-compiler [1]. Bottom line is, it's possible to make demos that look good, but it really doesn't work well enough to build software you would actually use. This naturally lends itself to the "everybody is taking about how great it is but nobody is building anything real…

Related, this reminds me of the time Cursor spent millions of dollars worth of tokens to write a new browser with LLMs and ended up with a non-functioning wrapper of existing browser libraries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646777

Re: Eight more months of agents

#238

Post by bdangubic »

lins1909 wrote: post #206
bdangubic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the number of experienced, senior programmers though, who are in “anti-LLM” camp, is still fairly staggering.

Why is that staggering? That feels like a pretty dramatic expression. Is it a foregone conclusion that one must use agents?

one does not have to use anything at all… but if someone is “senior” and is incapable of using llms for some parts of her/his job then senior part is just age related and not tied to skill level

Re: Eight more months of agents

#239

Post by bdangubic »

girvo wrote: post #101
estimator7292 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean when the tag line is "this will replace senior engineers and you, the senior engineer, must be forced to use it" Then yeah, it makes sense.

Yeah I’m baffled why people are surprised that senior+ engineers who are being told in one breath they will be replaced by this tool and also they MUST use this tool to make it better to replace them aren’t happy about it or want to use it willingly. I also find it wild how we’re sleepwalking into this, but I’m also part of the problem and using these things too.

as nvidia CEO wisely said - you won’t be replaced by these tools, you will be replaced by folk who excel at utilizing these tools

Re: Eight more months of agents

#240

Post by krinchan »

wongarsu wrote: post #214
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. Speedin…

I feel like we work at the same place. IT Husbandry/Debt Paying/KTLO whatever you call it is being ground into dust. Especially repetitive stuff that I originally would've needed a week to automate and never could get to the top of the once quarterly DevOps sprint...bam. GitHub Action workflow runs weekly to pull in the latest OS images, update and roll over a smoke test VM, monitor, roll over the rest or rollback and ping me in Slack. Done in half a day.

I've got a couple Claude Code skills set up where I just copy/paste a Slack link into it and it links people relevant docs, gives them relevant troubleshooting from our logs, and a hook on the slack tools appends a Claude signature to make sure they know they weren't worth my time.

That said, there's this weird quicksand people around me get in where they just spend weeks and weeks on their AI tools and don't actually do much of anything? Like bro you burned your 5 hour CC Enterprise limit all week and committed...nothing?

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