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We put a coding agent in a while loop

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Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#251

Post by boston_clone »

mr_toad wrote: post #233
VincentEvans wrote: post #12

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

A big part of the reason that people develop solutions in Excel is that they don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. No business case, no scope, no plan, and most importantly no budget. Unless a business allows any old employee to spin up cloud services on a whim we’re not going to see sales people spinning up containers and pipelines, AI or not.

What about a sales person interacting with an LLM that is already authz'd to spin up various cloud resources? I don't think that scenario is too far-fetched...

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#252

Post by joshmlewis »

One of the biggest nuggets people need to take away from this:

> At one point we tried “improving” the prompt with Claude’s help. It ballooned to 1,500 words. The agent immediately got slower and dumber. We went back to 103 words and it was back on track.

Keep your prompts / agent instructions short. Focus on the wide view, not specifics.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#253

Post by ponector »

_mocha wrote: post #227

I'm retired from the industry, and posts like these take me back to the early days of cybersecurity (where people memorized scripts). Talking with my nephews and nieces, I can already tell that many new grads struggle with fundamentals—things like choosing the right data types and containers for short-lived strings, understanding how memory allocation works, or even marginally improving a basic hashing function. I wo…

>>I worry the next decade will bring an influx of undertrained engineers.

How can it be the other way? No one is investing into education of their developers, also trying to save some money on them. Get cheap fresh grads and make them develop new stuff!

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#254

Post by mnky9800n »

VincentEvans wrote: post #12

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

I met a guy on the airplane the other day whose job is to vibe code for people who can't vibe code. He showed me his discord server (he paid for plane wifi), where he charges people 50$/month to be in the server and he helps them unfuck their vibe coded projects. He had around 1000 people in the server.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#256

Post by thyristan »

ozim wrote: post #250
jmathai wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software takes longer to develop than other parts of the org want to wait. AI is emerging as a possible solution to this decades old problem.

I don’t really see this as universal truth with corporate customers stalling process for up to 2 years or end users being reluctant to change. We were deploying new changes every 2 weeks and it was too fast. End users need training and communication, pushback was quite a thing. We also just pushed back aggressive timeline we had for migration to new tech. Much faster interface with shorter paths - but users went all…

Different situation. You already had a product that they were quite happy with, and that worked well for them. So they saw change as a problem, not a good thing. They weren't waiting for anything new, or anything to improve, they were happy on their couch and you made them move to redo the upholstery.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#258

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

jmathai wrote: post #205
ceuk wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching was supposed to be a prototype become the production code is one of the most constant themes of my 20 year career

Software takes longer to develop than other parts of the org want to wait. AI is emerging as a possible solution to this decades old problem.

Or as a new problem that it will persist for decades to come.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#259

Post by naasking »

thyristan wrote: post #212
camgunz wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding is how I build a sufficiently deep understanding of the problem space--there's no separating coding and understanding for me. I acknowledge there's different ways of working (and I imagine this is one of the reasons a lot of people think they get a lot more value out of LLMs than I do), but like, having Cursor crank code out for me actually slows me down. I have to read all the stuff it does so I can coach it…

Well, actually there could be a separate step: understanding is done during and after gathering requirements, before and while writing specifications. Only then are specifications turned into code. But almost no-one really works like that, and those three separate steps are often done ad-hoc, by the same person, right when the fingers hit the keys.

> Well, actually there could be a separate step: understanding is done during and after gathering requirements, before and while writing specifications. Only then are specifications turned into code.

The promise of coding AI is that it can maybe automate that last step so more intelligent humans can actually have time to focus on the more important first parts.

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