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Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

blog.alaindichiappari.dev

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Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#361

Post by skybrian »

xtracto wrote: post #322
skybrian wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if all you ask it to do is fix bugs. You can also ask it to work on code health things like better organization, better testing, finding interesting invariants and enforcing them, and so on. It's up to you what you want to prioritize.

I agree but want to interject that "code organization " won't matter for long. Programming Languages were made for people. I'm old enough to have programmed in z80 and 8086 assembler. I've been through plenty of prog.langs. through my career. But once building systems become prompting an agent to build a flow that reads these two types of excels, cleans them,filters them, merges them and outputs the result for the we…

There are certainly people working on making this happen. As a hobbyist, maybe I'll still have some retro fun polishing the source code for certain projects I care about? (Using our new power tools, of course.)

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#362

Post by kaydub »

verdverm wrote: post #176
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubt on that. AI usually only wastes time and produces bugs. > bbut you're holding it wrong, just two more prompts and three more agents and it will be a real boy So, you invented an IDE, except more opaque and expensive? Welcome to the club.

You both are likely incorrect, the answer lies in the middle rather than the extremes

I think a lot of the people pro-llm are already in the middle. It's the naysays that are sticking to a strict definition of "vibe coding" as if it's random people typing in "make me $app but make no bugs" and getting a 100% working $app with no bugs. You have the gastown folks trying to do that, but nobody serious putting in good work with llm agents is "vibe coding" in that way.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#363

Post by theonething »

A huge advantage of frameworks to me is to give new comers to the code a unified frame of reference. A Rails developer (or even a non-Rails guys who understands MVC) can jump into a Rails based codebase he is not familiar with a lot easier than the custom "from the ground up" thing the author espouses.

It's puzzling to me that the author doesn't even mention this huge and obvious benefit of frameworks.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#364

Post by seba_dos1 »

kaydub wrote: post #328
seba_dos1 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless you are only ever a single engineer, your career is filled with "I need to debug code I didn't write". That's the vast majority of my job and I've yet to find a way to have LLMs not be almost but not entirely useless at helping me with it. (also, it's filled with that even when you are a single engineer)

I hope you realize that means your position is in danger.

It would be in danger if LLMs could actually do that for me, but they're still very far from it and they progress slowly. One day I could start worrying, but it's not today.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#365

Post by seff »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #313
dasil003 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with both you and the GP. Yes, coding is being totally revolutionized by AI, and we don't really know where the ceiling will be (though I'm skeptical we'll reach true AGI any time soon), but I believe there still an essential element of understanding how computer systems work that is required to leverage AI in a sustainable way. There is some combination of curiosity of inner workings and precision of thought…

I can see why people are skeptical devs can be 10x as productive. But something I'd bet money on is that devs are 10x more productive at using these tools.

I view the current tools as more of a multiplier of base skill.

A 1x engineer may become a 5x engineer, but a -1x will also produce 5x more bad code.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#366

Post by nubg »

To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries?

This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher.

I'm 100% honestly looking forward to finding a single justification that would not fit both scenarios.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#367

Post by J_Shelby_J »

pragmatic wrote: post #284
redleggedfrog wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is already here. Been working a few years at a subsidiary of a large corporation where the entire hierarchy of companies is pushing AI hard, at different levels of complexity, from office work up through software development. Regular company meetings across companies and divisions to discuss methods and progress. Overall not a bad strategy and it's paying dividends. A experiment was tried on a large and ve…

These are the blog posts we need. This is the siren song of llm. "Look how much progress we made" Effort increases as time to completion decreases. The last 10% of the project takes 90% of the effort as you try to finish up, deploy,integrate and find the gaps. Llms are woefully incapable of that as that knowledge doesn't exist in a markdown file. It's in people's heads and you have to pry it out with a crowbar or as…

For complex code bases generated by AI the last 10% takes 190% of the effort because you end up tearing it all apart to rebuild it right.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#368

Post by alainrk »

3vidence wrote: post #335
alainrk wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest to read the full article :)

The thesis of the article is that software other people have built is bad (frameworks) but software my LLM agent is good (for undisclosed reasons). I think it just adds to the noise of our industry that reusable patterns and standards don't matter

Strawman argument.

Standards and patterns matter, but discernment matters more. The issue isn't reusability itself, it's the cargo-cult adoption of frameworks that solve problems you don't have, when you don't have them.

Your LLM agent works for undiscussed reasons because you made deliberate architectural choices for your specific context. That's engineering. Blindly importing a framework just because "everyone uses it" is the opposite. That's the point, nothing more nothing less.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#369

Post by skybrian »

pragmatic wrote: post #281
skybrian wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if all you ask it to do is fix bugs. You can also ask it to work on code health things like better organization, better testing, finding interesting invariants and enforcing them, and so on. It's up to you what you want to prioritize.

Your assuming that scrum/agile/management won't take this over? What stakeholder is prioritizing any of those things and paying for it out of their budget? Code improvement projects are the White Whale of software engineering - obsessed over but rarely from a business point of view worth it.

The costs for code improvement projects have gone down dramatically now that we have power tools. So, perhaps it will be considered more worthwhile now? But how this actually plays out for professional programming is going to depend on company culture and management.

In my case, I'm an early-retired hobbyist programmer, so I control the budget. The same is true for any open source project.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#370

Post by poulsbohemian »

mark242 wrote: post #215
rglover wrote: post #139

A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code). The hubris around AI is goi…

I would argue that it's going to be the opposite. At re:Invent, one of the popular sessions was in creating a trio of SRE agents, one of which did nothing but read logs and report errors, one of which did analysis of the errors and triaged and proposed fixes, and one to do the work and submit PRs to your repo. Then, as part of the session, you would artificially introduce a bug into the system, then run into the bug…

I think back on the ten+ years I spent doing SRE consulting and the thing is, finding the problems and identifying solutions — the technical part of the work — was such a small part of the actual work. So often I would go to work with a client and discover that they often already knew the problem, they just didn’t believe it - my job was often about the psychology of the organization more than the technical knowledge. So you might say “Great, so the agent will automatically fix the problem that the organization previous misidentified.” That sounds great right up until it starts dreaming… it’s not to say there aren’t places for these agents, but I suspect ultimately it will be like any other technology we use where it becomes part of the toolkit, not the whole.
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