Just don’t use the same model to write and vet the code. Use two or more different models to verify the code in addition to reading it yourself.
Agents that run while I sleep
241–250 of 532 posts
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing; but PHP, in experienced hands, will be waaay more productive for small-to-medium things. One issue is that experienced hands are increasingly hard to come by. Truly big, complicated things, built by large teams or numbers of teams, teams with a lot of average brains or AIs trained on average brains, will be better off in something like Typescript/React. And everyone wants to work on the big complicated stuff…
I worked at a startup, they built their API in PHP because it was easy and fast. Now they're successful, app doesn't scale, high latency etc. What does their php code do? 95% of it is calling a DB. You're telling me today with LLM power multiplier it's THAT much faster to write in PHP compared to something that can actually have a future?
by future do you mean Future or metaphorical future? :)
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford, I still think that we, programmers, having to pay money in order to write code is a travesti. And I'm not talking about paying the license for the odd text editor or even for an operating system, I'm talking about day-to-day operations. I'm surprised that there isn't a bigger push-back against this idea.
Dw, there's quite a lot of push back against AI in some of the communities I hang around in. It's just rarely seldom visible here on HN. It's usually not about the price, but more about the fact that a few megacorps and countries "own" the ability to work this way. This leads to some very real risks that I'm pretty sure will materialize at some point in time, including but not limited to: - Geopolitical pressure - if…
China did users a solid and Qwen is a thing, so the scenario where Anthropic/OpenAI/Google collude and segment the market to ratchet prices in unison just isn’t possible. Amodei talking about value based pricing is a dream unless they buy legislation to outlaw competitors. Altman might have beat them to that punch with this admin, though. Most of us are operating on 10-40% margins. Usually on the low end when there aren’t legal barriers. The 80-99% margins or rent extraction rights SaaS people expect is just out of touch. The revenue the big 3 already pull in now has a lot more to do with branding and fear-mongering than product quality.
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can if your refactor needs to deal with interface changes, like moving methods around, changing argument order etc... all these need to propagate to the tests
Your tests are an assertion that 'no matter what this will never change'. If your interface can change then you are testing implementation details instead of the behavior users care about. the above is really hard. A lot of tdd 'experts' don't understand is and teach fragile tests that are not worth having.
Sure if you are changing your interfaces a lot you either are leaking abstractions or you aren't designing your interfaces well.
But things evolve with time. Not only your software is required to do things it wasn't originally designed to do, but your understanding of the domain evolve, and what once was fine becomes obsolete or insufficient.
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
> coders think that these random text generators are trustworthy enough to run unsupervised, we've moved all of this chaotic energy up a level But it works well enough for most use cases. Most of what we do isn’t life or death.
> But it works well enough for most use cases. So does the code produced by any bad engineer. So either we’re finally admitting that all of that leetcode screening and engineer quality gating was a farce, or it wasn’t, and you’re wrong. I think the answer is in the middle, but the pendulum has swung too far in the “doesn’t matter” direction.
> we’re finally admitting that all of that leetcode screening and engineer quality gating was a farce, or it wasn’t, and you’re wrong
We’re admitting a bit of both. Offshoring just became more instantaneous, secure and efficient. There will still be folks who overplay their hand.
Macroeconomically speaking, I don’t see why we need more software engineers in the future than we have today, and that’s probably a conservative estimate.
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#246This _all_ (waves hands around) sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Writing _all_ (waves hands around various llm wrapper git repos) these frameworks and harnesses, built on top of ever changing models sure doesn't feel sensible. I don't know what the best way of using these things is, but from my personal experience, the defaults get me a looong wa…
> sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper.
Not if you are an AI gold rush shovel salesman.
From the article:
> I've run Claude Code workshops for over 100 engineers in the last six months
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not have to "build" anything. You edit code and it is already deployed on your dev instance. Deploying to production is just scp -rv * production:/var/www/ Beautifully simple. No npm build crap.
You trade having to compile for actually having code that can scale
Not sure what you’re talking about, I scaled to millions of users on a pair of boxes with PHP, and its page generation time absolutely crushed Rails/Django times. Apache with mod PHP auto scales wonderfully.
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#248I guess to reach this point you have already decided you don't care what the code looks like. Something I'm starting to struggle with is when agents can now do longer and more complex tasks, how do you review all the code? Last week I did about 4 weeks of work over 2 days first with long running agents working against plans and checklists, then smaller task clean ups, bugfixes and refactors. But all this code needs t…
You’re not alone. I went from being a mediocre security engineer to a full time reviewer of LLM code reviews last week. I just read reports and report on incomplete code all day. Sometimes things get humorously worse from review to review. I take breaks by typing out the PoCs the LLMs spell out for me…
I'm security engineer too and when it really will come so far that I only review LLM code I refuse to do it for fewer than my doubled hourly rate.
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds a lot like paying for online ads, they don't work because you're not paying enough, when in reality bots, scrapers and now agents are just running up all the clicks. You pay more to try and get above that noise and hope you'll reach an actual human. The new "fast mode" that burns tokens at 6 times the rate is just scary because that's what everyone still soon say we all need to be using to get results.
It feels like everyone's gone mad. Here I am mostly writing code by hand, with some AI assistant help. I have a Claude subscription but only use it occasionally because it can take more time to review and fix the generated code as it would to hand-write it. Claude only saves me time on a minority of tasks where it's faster to prompt than hand-write. And then I read about people spending hundreds or thousands of dolla…
Why read code when you are getting results fast ? See https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
I am not kidding. People don't seem to understand what's actually happening in our industry. See https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johubbard_github-eleutherailm...
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you have become a reviewer instead of a programmer? Is that so? hones question. And if so, what is the advantage of looking a code for 12 hours instead of coding for 12.
Build features faster. Granted, this exposes the difference between people who like to finish projects and people who like to get paid a lot of money for typing on a keyboard.
Bullshit! You project isn't finished as long as there are obvious major bugs that you can't fix because you don't unterstand the code.