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Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

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Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#31

Post by dijksterhuis »

mark242 wrote: post #7
palmotea wrote: post #2

> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers.... > In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of…

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

> the fun in the job should be to

man... can we not just accept that individuals have their own motivations and maybe my reasons for wanting to do the job aren't the same as yours?

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#32

Post by irishcoffee »

mark242 wrote: post #19
lelanthran wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. You don't need to be a software engineer to do that.

Except you kind of do -- understanding data structures, understanding software engineering concepts, all of the things that you learn as a good engineer, those are ways that you help guide the LLM in its work.

I don't think kids are learning those things in 2026, they just ask an LLM.

Someone posted on here the other day about how they were taking a non-credit writing class in college so as to improve their writing, that was the reason the course existed. 90% of the class was kicked out because they were using LLMs to write for them, when the entire purpose of the class was to improve ones own writing.

Why do you think it will be any different with programming?

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#33

Post by tao_oat »

I didn't find this very convincing. Especially the argument around artificially low cost -- we know that training the next model is the biggest cost for these companies, and we've already seen inference costs fall drastically (https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends).

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#34

Post by skybrian »

These "truths" are more like concerns.

Skills do atrophy if you don't practice them, but also, refreshing your memory about some technology you haven't used in a while, or even learning something new, is easier than ever. You can ask the AI questions and try things out yourself very easily. Maybe "just in time" learning isn't good enough, but that's more of a concern based on speculation than a truth.

AI is being subsidized, but also, inference costs are dropping due to algorithmic improvements. For example, TurboQuant [1] looks pretty promising and even if it doesn't pan out, there are plenty of other potential advances like that. Competition might result in AI inference being available at good prices even without subsidies. So, again, more of a concern than a "truth."

Prompt injection: an unsolved mess, but perhaps curated, trusted datasets will be good enough for many projects, so you don't have to expose your agent to the open Internet? It's a similar problem to the supply-chain vulnerabilities that downloadable open source libraries have. A valid concern, but it seems like we'll improve security and muddle through?

Copyright: also an unsolved mess, but kind of similar. Search engines copy the web as part of how they work, but that didn't stop Google from becoming big tech. And sure, Napster was built on copying music and was shut down, but YouTube was also built on widespread copyright violation and it muddled through. It's unclear whether copyright law is load-bearing infrastructure for the software industry or for open source software.

[1] https://github.com/tonbistudio/turboquant-pytorch

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#35

Post by oidar »

mark242 wrote: post #7
palmotea wrote: post #2

> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers.... > In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of…

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

> The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

If a person needs an LLM to figure where an semicolon goes, a LLM is not going to help them code.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#36

Post by bigyikes »

tao_oat wrote: post #33

I didn't find this very convincing. Especially the argument around artificially low cost -- we know that training the next model is the biggest cost for these companies, and we've already seen inference costs fall drastically ( https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends ).

Yes, Dario has publicly stated that models are already profitable if you exclude R&D for the next model.

Even if that’s not true, given that hardware and software efficiency gains can be expected to continue it’s likely that this is the most expensive the current level of intelligence will ever be.

The frontier models may increase in price, but only because they’re also more capable. If you hold intelligence constant, price should fall over time.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#37

Post by jjcm »

I disagree with the author's interpretation of many of their points.

> Skill Atrophy

Very true, but in the same way moving from assembly -> scripting languages degraded the skill of programmers to manage memory. AI is another tool (albeit one that's on a different level than any other transformation we've had); what matters is whether the programmer understands the intent of the code, not the 0's and 1's that it turns into. That intent is still there, we're just writing it at a much higher level than before.

> Artificially low cost

This heavily depends model to model. IMO OpenAI/Anthropic are likely the outliers here, and I do agree that it's unlikely they'll recoup the training costs for their specific models, but they also legitimized an industry - something that's hard to tangibly price. Many of the models out of China however will almost certainly recoup cost. Qwen 3 had a training price of around $1.6m USD. In the first quarter of this year OpenRouter processed around 5 trillion tokens from it, landing at around 2.5m in revenue (very rough numbers). Assuming a 30% margin, that's already 40% of their training cost in revenue for a quarter from a single platform - their usage in china is almost certainly higher.

The reality is training costs are getting cheaper. I agree that currently the top providers are heavily subsidizing costs, but that doesn't mean you can't drive revenue, they just choose not to as having the "best" model right now gives them clout.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#38

Post by dybber »

palmotea wrote: post #2

> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers.... > In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of…

I think it depends on what you find enjoyable. I think people who like the tinkering and the actual act of coding, debugging, etc. will find it less and less fun to be in this area, but people who like to look at the big picture, and solve problems, will see that they will now be better at both getting overview of larger and larger codebases and that technical debt that was never attainable to solve before can now be “outsourced” to LLM’s.

I find that fun. I work in a 50 year old IT company, with lots of legacy code and technical debt which we have never been able to address - suddenly it’s within reach to really get us to a better place.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#39

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

palmotea wrote: post #2

> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers.... > In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of…

The “fun” for me has never been “coding” and on the enterprise dev side that has been a commodity for a decade.

If you look at the leveling guidelines for any tech company “codez real gud” will only get you to a mid level ticket taker.

Re: Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents

#40

Post by theshackleford »

mark242 wrote: post #7
palmotea wrote: post #2

> The role change has been described by some as becoming a sort of software engineering manager, where one writes little or no code oneself but instead supervises a team of AI coding agents as if they are a team of human junior software engineers.... > In reality, though, the code review load for software engineers will gradually increase as fewer and fewer of them are expected to supervise an ever-growing number of…

> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job. Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

> the fun in the job should be

I think i'm going to let people decide for themselves what they enjoy in their job rather than pretending I know better than they do what they should and should not enjoy.

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