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Agents that run while I sleep

claudecodecamp.com

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Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#331

Post by voidUpdate »

misja111 wrote: post #320
jspdown wrote: post #308

At this stage, AI is no longer a tool that enhances your ability to ship code, it has replaced you entirely in that role. You don't control what is shipped, and you can't verify if it's correct. That's a serious problem! As software engineers, we remain accountable for code we no longer fully understand. Then, what comes next feels less like a new software practice and more like a new religion, where trust has to rep…

Speak for yourself, I don't ship any code that I don't fully understand. Yes that requires less autonomous AI and less frequent merging. But I don't even want to think about the disasters that could happen if you really get into the habit of shipping code you can't verify or understand.

Out of interest, what's the speedup between having an LLM write code for you and then having to go through and understand it, vs writing code that you understand immediately because you wrote it?

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#332

Post by mewpmewp2 »

computerdork wrote: post #272
godelski wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe we're back to advocating for TDD. It was a failed paradigm that last few times we tried it. This time isn't any different because the fundamental flaw has always been the same: tests aren't proofs, they don't have complete coverage. Before anyone gets too confused, I love tests. They're great. They help a lot. But to believe they prove correctness is absolutely laughable. Even the most general tests a…

Hmm, not so sure TDD is a failed paradigm. Maybe it isn't a pancea, but it is seems like it's changed how software development is done. Especially for backend software and also for tools, seems like automated tests can cover quite a lot of use cases a system encounters. Their coverage can become so good that they'll allow you to make major changes to the system, and as long as they pass the automated tests, you can f…

I think tests in general are good, just not TDD as it forces you to what I think bad and narrow paradigm of thinking. I think e.g. it is better that I build the thing, then get to 90%+ coverage once I am sure this is what I would also ship.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#333

Post by codethief »

joegaebel wrote: post #149
egeozcan wrote: post #26

You can always tell claude to use red-green-refactor and that really is a step-up from "yeah don't forget to write tests and make sure they pass" at the end of the prompt, sure. But even better, tell it to create subagents to form red team, green team and refactor team while the main instance coordinates them, respecting the clean-room rules. It really works. The trick is just not mixing/sharing the context. Differen…

I've been able to encode Outside-in Test Driven Development into a repeatable workflow. Claude Code follows it to a T, and I've gotten great results. I've written about it more here, and created a repo people can use out of the box to try it out: https://www.joegaebel.com/articles/principled-agentic-softwa... https://github.com/JoeGaebel/outside-in-tdd-starter

Thanks for sharing!

> When asking Claude Code to write tests, I find they are inevitably coupled to implementation details, mockist, brittle, and missing coverage.

Interestingly, I haven't noticed any of that so far, using Claude Code on a new-ish project (couple 10k loc). However, I also went out of my way in my CLAUDE.md to instruct it to write functional code, avoid side effects / push side effects to the shell (functional core, imperative shell), avoid mocks in tests, etc. etc.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#334

Post by PUSH_AX »

frio wrote: post #304
jack_pp wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

“PHP was so easy and fast that they’ve built such a successful startup they now have scaling problems” is, as far as I can tell, an endorsement of PHP and not a criticism of it.

Yes, startup success has a direct correlation to the language chosen for your CRUD api…

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#335

Post by skeledrew »

frio wrote: post #304
jack_pp wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

“PHP was so easy and fast that they’ve built such a successful startup they now have scaling problems” is, as far as I can tell, an endorsement of PHP and not a criticism of it.

I think the point here is that the scaling problem is hard because of PHP.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#336

Post by p2detar »

recroad wrote: post #83

Am I supposed to be impressed by this? I think people are now just using agents for the sake of it. I'm perfectly happy running two simple agents, one for writing and one for reviewing. I don't need to go be writing code at faster than light speed. Just focusing on the spec, and watching the agent as it does its work and intervening when it goes sideways is perfectly fine with me. I'm doing 5-7x productivity easily,…

I'm on the same ship. Running 2 agents and seeing a vast amount of productivity increase. Not always though. Sometimes the solutions are very over-engineered and I need to guide the agent to where I want it to go. I do a lot of micro-management, which is totally not where people with agent-orchestras seem to go nowadays.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#337

Post by evrenesat »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #300
hi_hi wrote: post #206

This _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…

I would encourage my competitors to use AI agents on their codebase as much as possible. Make sure every new feature has it, lots of velocity! Run those suckers day and night. Don't review it, just make sure the feature is there! Then when the music stops, the AI companies hit the economic realities, go insolvent, and they are left with no one who understands a sprawling tangled web of code that is 80% AI generated,…

Qwen3 Coder Next and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B already very good and can be run on today's higher end home computers with good speed. Tomorrow's machines will not be slower but models are keep getting more efficient. A good sw engineer still would be valuable in Tomorrow's world but not as a software assembler.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#338

Post by lugu »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #300
hi_hi wrote: post #206

This _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…

I would encourage my competitors to use AI agents on their codebase as much as possible. Make sure every new feature has it, lots of velocity! Run those suckers day and night. Don't review it, just make sure the feature is there! Then when the music stops, the AI companies hit the economic realities, go insolvent, and they are left with no one who understands a sprawling tangled web of code that is 80% AI generated,…

Both be true at the same time: some teams spend a fortune on AI and the AI investments won't get the expected ROI (bubble collapse). What is sure is that a lot of capacity is been built and that capacity won't disappear.

What I could see happening in your scenario is the company suffers from diminishing return as every task becomes more expensive (new feature, debugging session, library update, refactoring, security audit, rollouts, infra cost). They could also end up with an incoherent gigantic product that doesn't make sense to their customer.

Both pitfall are avoidable, but they require focus and attention to detail. Things we still need humans for.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#339

Post by skeledrew »

rurban wrote: post #260
jack_pp wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

PHP did better than python and perl. Python is doomed. PHP got a good jit already, a good OO lately, good frameworks, stable extensions. It has a company behind. Unlike python or ruby which break right and left all the time on updates. you have to use bunkers of venvs, without any security updates. A nightmare. PHP can scale and has a future.

Introducing uv...

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#340

Post by foo42 »

xandrius wrote: post #112
paganel wrote: post #98

Earlier 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.

It's silly, who wouldn't answer yes to the question "would you like to finish your task faster?". The real trick is to produce more but by putting less effort than before.

I salaried employees who are paid by time, and are paying their own Anthropic bills.

Initially there is perhaps a mitigating advantage of briefly impressing ourselves or others with output, but that will quickly fade into the new normal.

Net result: employee paying significant money to produce more, but capturing none of that value.

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