Agent harnesses have barely been available for a year, and reasonably reliable for only half, and there's already fatigue. I think this says less about whether LLM's will actually be able to program and more about how mentally exhausting AI-assisted programming can be, which involves a higher frequency of decision making and reading an astronomical amount of both code and prose if you actually want to stay on top of…
The Eternal Sloptember
301–310 of 389 posts
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM How long do you think it will be before you can't write any code because you're out of practice? One of the dangers of engineering management is that it can turn you into a person that can no longer do the thing. Does that even matter?
That's fair. In all honesty I'm already feeling challenged but given how much time I save I can set aside some time to keep myself sharp. I can learn more languages. Additionally, as pointed out by others, I'm trading coding effort for design and and strategy, which generally control business outcomes a lot more. Having said that, I won't use AI for production system if I don't understand the programming constructs i…
How many more languages have you learnt, and how much time have you spent keeping yourself sharp? 99% of your work time, right?
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ability to read code doesn’t decay at nearly the same rate. Neither does your experience.
I review every diff the clanker makes. After a few hours of this I still look at the codebase and think "wtf is this?". I think writing the code is a very important part of understanding it. LLM driven development is like doing maintenance programming from day one.
I've used that as well, it's like starting with a legacy app every time.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very good way to describe what they do (better than 'AI') but ironically, it really well explains the mechanism, and how they are in fact able to 'code so well' which is contrary to the authors own premise. Agents code extremely well. They're not particularly good at 'architecture' and I think that's where his specific concerns about 'not being able to see the problems' arise - the issues are are almost neve…
> Of course it's producing gargantuan amounts of slop - that's not because 'it can't code' That is precisely because it can't code! Or rather, it's because it can't reason, or understand things, which in turn means it can't code. The output of LLMs is sloppy because they have no understanding of what they are doing.
"Airplanes don't fly, humans do!"
People are hallucinating on this thread.
That people will say 'Code Me An App' and expect some kind of magical results, will be more common than not, but it's no way evidence that the AI can't code.
Given a sufficiently detailed prompt, the AI will produce almost whatever you ask it within a certain scale.
As sure as the sky is blue.
And it will make perfectly compilable code usually on the first prompt.
Obviously, it can code.
Obviously, it can 'synthetically reason' about the code.
You can point it an arbitrary code base and it will give a better overall assessment than most humans.
Is it fallible? Obviously. Is it limited in scope? Obviously.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. This is only true in the beginning, when machines are still primitive (e.g. first automatic looms). Nowadays machines mostly yield much better quality than any human can produce (e.g. automated welding, anything CNC controlled). Many things are only possible to build with machines (e.g. semiconductors). > A hand-crafted solid wood table is sti…
Ikea does sell both ends of range; its has solid wood and particle boards.
They have "bottom of the barrel" and slightly better quality products. But the better products are nowhere near the (top) end of the range.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a granular level, it's almost guaranteed that you cannot write better code than an agent. Agents now are writing extremely consistent, normalized canonical code, that usually compiles the first time. Right out of the 'textbook'. For what it's trying to do - it writes nearly perfect code. The only thing you could nominally disagree with are some of the conventions and idioms. It 'writes a perfect novel, in perfect…
It can’t even write a passable novel… if you know of a great LLM-authored novel I should read please point me to it and I’ll take your recommendation!
AI can already easily emulate human creative output [1][2] and there is zero change that you or anyone else can reliably detect AI output with any degree of consistency.
Even with the few 'tell tale' patterns it's been leaving ... that threshold is being moved past quite quickly. Within not even 6 months, works will be identical for all bus some specific activities.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147738802... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41077-025-00396-6...
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reality: the top nth percent of coders are seeing absurd, dramatic gains in productivity using LLMs. See: antirez, Simon Willison, Steve Yegge. The more experience you bring to the table, the more value you get from these tools. Look, about 12 years ago articles about how if you're not pair programming you're doing it wrong were on HN's home page every day. Doing well prompted plan -> agent -> debug cycles is like pa…
antirez is famous for creating Redis, which took a dump in quality and everyone switched to a fork called Valkey.
and Steve Yegge is currently just burning mountains of money with Gas Town or whatever came after that
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#308My guess is the models just continue to get better and better When I got into agentic coding a year or two ago I was sure it was only good at autocomplete. Something happened earlier this year where the models hit a new level of capability. Everyone I know now just does agentic coding, and it’s really amazing. I think we should just try pushing this as far as we can possibly go, it really feels like the acceleration…
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Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea. Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor. Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skil…
>Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor. And yet my working class grandparents didn't eat off the floor, they had great quality tables. Mine is made of disguised cardboard. This is a big part of the problem, there is zero trust that any potential improvement in cost or access will reach consumers. Companies don't…
Its interesting, I think people sometimes think there is some binary existence of furniture sometimes! What's nice about todays modern economy is that there is a whole spectrum of tables I can purchase.
I can get a ultra cheap mdf Walmart table, a slightly less cheap Ikea table, maybe a midrange crate and barrel table, or a very expensive hard wood table from the local furniture store. Here in the Midwest we even have hand made Amish furniture available. So buy what you want!
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#310We all remember cryptocurrency. Everyone in tech proclaimed fiat was dead, every office buzzed with talk of every possible way that cryptocurrency could be used, billions of dollars flooded in to projects losing money hand over fist. The cynics reacted to the froth with outright rejection of the idea. And today… cryptocurrency exists, it has some use, but it didn’t take over the world, it didn’t kill fiat, it was use…
Almost nobody used crypto, everyone is using AI, every day for doing productive work and almost nobody would give it up. I don't understand how it's remotely reasonable to try to make the comparison.
I would throw it away for everyone in an instant if it was possible.