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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?

#231

Post by tracker1 »

pryelluw wrote: post #228
tracker1 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of the point in GP... everything around the code has improved... the workflows, definitions, documentation, process. I'd say that all of those things are improving and expanding at a rate faster than the improvements in code output, which are also happening at a faster turn around than actual people. I've said several times that when I use an Agent, I'm getting about 2-4x the value and about 10x the outpu…

Then is it a real 10x increase in output if the output is in supporting areas and not the code/feature delivery? It seems like you’re saying that you are now able to maintain documentation at a faster rate and increase testing but not the actual development speed of the feature itself.

I said 2-4x on value.. which would be development of the feature itself in terms of direct output... not even considering setting up test harnesses and doing more adventurous changes that would take me a lot longer to do.

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

#233

Post by pryelluw »

tracker1 wrote: post #231
pryelluw wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then is it a real 10x increase in output if the output is in supporting areas and not the code/feature delivery? It seems like you’re saying that you are now able to maintain documentation at a faster rate and increase testing but not the actual development speed of the feature itself.

I said 2-4x on value.. which would be development of the feature itself in terms of direct output... not even considering setting up test harnesses and doing more adventurous changes that would take me a lot longer to do.

I was referring to the sentence: I'm getting about 2-4x the value and about 10x the output... the "value" is features landing in code and the difference to the 10x is documentation and testing.

What does the 10x imply?

And are you saying that you are outputting 2-4x as in: value * value * value * value in the case of 4x? That seems rather high.

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

#234

Post by nsxwolf »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #103
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…

> 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…

Everybody’s cooking, nobody’s eating.

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

#235

Post by yodsanklai »

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…

Sometimes I wonder if people praising AI work on the same type of code as I do.

Just now, I was working on a bug report. I had Claude write the code. Perfect, CI is green, new tests, everything seems fine. Took me 5 minutes. Then looking closer, I can see that there may be a performance regression and that the code seems pretty verbose. I iterate on the prompt "of course, you're right, let me fix this". New code is even more verbose, lots of comments that shouldn't be there, the code is more intricate, it takes me some time to understand what's going on. Plus new test cases to review.

After a day of asynchronous iterations on this, I finally sit down to look at this problem. There was a one line fix that Claude couldn't find on its own.

I lost time, reviewer lost time, and if this had been shipped as is, the system would have been worse. I could go on and on because this happens daily. And the worst part is teammates submitting slop.

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

#236

Post by BlueRock-Jake »

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…

Agreed on the floor being raised. The part I'd push back on is "fixing issues is now basically free." That's true for the issues that surface in code review or a failing test. The new class of issue is good-looking code that does something unexpected at runtime, usually through chains of tool calls that each looked fine in isolation. Those don't fail your tests. They fail in prod, sometimes quietly.

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

#238

Post by whatever1 »

Stop spending time on design. Try all of the permutations and stress test them.

Stop caring about extendable modular code. Just rewrite from scratch when you have new requirements.

Build a demo for every idea you have.

Build 100 visualizations and metrics for any algorithm you develop.

We are finally free of friction. Bad news is we have no brakes. Brace for impact.

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

#239

Post by conor- »

whatever1 wrote: post #238

Stop spending time on design. Try all of the permutations and stress test them. Stop caring about extendable modular code. Just rewrite from scratch when you have new requirements. Build a demo for every idea you have. Build 100 visualizations and metrics for any algorithm you develop. We are finally free of friction. Bad news is we have no brakes. Brace for impact.

> We are finally free of friction

Free from friction, constrained by pricing and a massive ladder that can be pulled up by companies that are in no way benevolent.

If you're one of the lucky few who were able to already have hardware that can run some of the open weight models you can be a beneficiary for now - but that won't last forever.

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

#240

Post by girvo »

swader999 wrote: post #136
girvo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dirty secret is all the people talking about shipping 4 features a day etc are just lying about reviewing anything. They don’t review it at all.

I review more thoroughly and faster with Claude than without.

I'm faster, sure, but more thorough, no. The same, because I was already very careful. But it's not a massive win either; 4.7 misses too much still because it would need to read too much of the context each time to understand the architectural problems I'm catching.

Its nice to not have to care about nits and other things that we don't have lints for though, so that's useful.

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