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Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

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Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#41

Post by stocksinsmocks »

ceejayoz wrote: post #21
ElijahLynn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, it ain't ever gonna be over, it is a new era. We need to adapt to new ways of thinking and ways of working with new tooling. It is a learning curve of sorts. What we want is to solve problems, the new tooling enables us to solve problems better by letting us free up our thinking by reducing blockers and toil tasks, giving us more time to think about higher level problems. I remember this same sentiment towards A…

> I remember this same sentiment towards AI when I was growing up, but towards cell phones... Sure. But the same for NFTs. We'll see which one this winds up being.

The value of an NFT is the speculation that a bigger fool than you is in the market (and if you’re average, there is).

The value of AI coding is that it can eliminate some of the labor of programming, which is the overwhelming majority of cost.

These value propositions are nothing alike.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#42

Post by coffeefirst »

rfw300 wrote: post #11

I'd like others' input on this: increasingly, I see Cursor, Jetbrains, etc. moving towards a model of having you manage many agents working on different tasks simultaneously. But in real, production codebases, I've found that even a single agent is faster at generating code than I am at evaluating its fitness and providing design guidance. Adding more agents working on different things would not speed anything up. Bu…

No... I've found the opposite where using the fastest model to do the smallest pieces is useful and anything where I have to wait 2m for a wrong answer is just on the way.

There's pretty much no way anyone context switching that fast is paying a lick of attention. They may be having fun, like scrolling tiktok or playing a videogame just piling on stimuli, but I don't believe they're getting anything done. It's plausible they're smarter than me, it is not plausible they have a totally different kind of brain chemistry.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#43

Post by c-linkage »

torben-friis wrote: post #40
rfw300 wrote: post #11

I'd like others' input on this: increasingly, I see Cursor, Jetbrains, etc. moving towards a model of having you manage many agents working on different tasks simultaneously. But in real, production codebases, I've found that even a single agent is faster at generating code than I am at evaluating its fitness and providing design guidance. Adding more agents working on different things would not speed anything up. Bu…

I really would like an answer to this. My CTO is currently working on the ability to run several dockerised versions of the codebase in parallel for this kind of flow. I’m here wondering how anyone could work on several tasks at once at a speed where they can read, review and iterate the output of one LLM in the time it takes for another LLM to spit an answer for a different task. Like, are we just asking things as f…

I was going to say that this is how genetic algorithms work, but there is still too much human in the loop.

Maybe code husbandry?

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#44

Post by tcdent »

rfw300 wrote: post #11

I'd like others' input on this: increasingly, I see Cursor, Jetbrains, etc. moving towards a model of having you manage many agents working on different tasks simultaneously. But in real, production codebases, I've found that even a single agent is faster at generating code than I am at evaluating its fitness and providing design guidance. Adding more agents working on different things would not speed anything up. Bu…

Rather than having multiple agents running inside of one IDE window, I structure my codebase in a way that is somewhat siloed to facilitate development by multiple agents. This is an obvious and common pattern when you have a front-end and a back-end. Super easy to just open up those directories of the repository in separate environments and have them work in their own siloed space.

Then I take it a step further and create core libraries that are structured like standalone packages and are architected like third-party libraries with their own documentation and public API, which gives clear boundaries of responsibility.

Then the only somewhat manual step you have is to copy/paste the agent's notes of the changes that they made so that dependent systems can integrate them.

I find this to be way more sustainable than spawning multiple agents on a single codebase and then having to rectify merge conflicts between them as each task is completed; it's not unlike traditional software development where a branch that needs review contains some general functionality that would be beneficial to another branch and then you're left either cherry-picking a commit, sharing it between PRs, or lumping your PRs together.

Depending on the project I might have 6-10 IDE sessions. Each agent has its own history then and anything to do with running test harnesses or CLI interactions gets managed on that instance as well.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#45

Post by Aeolun »

torben-friis wrote: post #40
rfw300 wrote: post #11

I'd like others' input on this: increasingly, I see Cursor, Jetbrains, etc. moving towards a model of having you manage many agents working on different tasks simultaneously. But in real, production codebases, I've found that even a single agent is faster at generating code than I am at evaluating its fitness and providing design guidance. Adding more agents working on different things would not speed anything up. Bu…

I really would like an answer to this. My CTO is currently working on the ability to run several dockerised versions of the codebase in parallel for this kind of flow. I’m here wondering how anyone could work on several tasks at once at a speed where they can read, review and iterate the output of one LLM in the time it takes for another LLM to spit an answer for a different task. Like, are we just asking things as f…

Hmm, I haven’t managed to make it work yet, and I’ve tried. The best I can manage is three completely separate projects, and they all get only divided attention (which is often good enough these days).

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#46

Post by cube2222 »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #27
rfw300 wrote: post #11

I'd like others' input on this: increasingly, I see Cursor, Jetbrains, etc. moving towards a model of having you manage many agents working on different tasks simultaneously. But in real, production codebases, I've found that even a single agent is faster at generating code than I am at evaluating its fitness and providing design guidance. Adding more agents working on different things would not speed anything up. Bu…

I usually run one agent at a time in an interactive, pair-programming way. Occasionally (like once a week) I have some task where it makes sense to have one agent run for a long time. Then I'll create a separate jj workspace (equivalent of git worktree) and let it run. I would probably never run a second agent unless I expected the task to take at least two hours, any more than that and the cost of multitasking for m…

Same.

I've recently described how I vibe-coded a tool to run this single background agent in a docker container in a jj workspace[0] while I work with my foreground agent but... my reviewing throughput is usually saturated by a single agent already, and I barely ever run the second one.

New tools keep coming up for running fleets of agents, and I see no reason to switch from my single-threaded Claude Code.

What I would like to see instead, are efforts on making the reviewing step faster. The Amp folks had an interesting preview article on this recently[1]. This is the direction I want tools to be exploring if they want to win me over - help me solve the review bottleneck.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970668

[1]: https://ampcode.com/news/review

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#47

Post by torben-friis »

ivape wrote: post #32
rfw300 wrote: post #11

I'd like others' input on this: increasingly, I see Cursor, Jetbrains, etc. moving towards a model of having you manage many agents working on different tasks simultaneously. But in real, production codebases, I've found that even a single agent is faster at generating code than I am at evaluating its fitness and providing design guidance. Adding more agents working on different things would not speed anything up. Bu…

Right. A computer can make more code than a human can review. So, forget about the universe where you ever review code. You have to shift to almost a QA person and ignore all code and just validate the output. When it is suggested that you as a programmer will disappear, this is what they mean.

>You have to shift to almost a QA person and ignore all code and just validate the output.

The obvious answer to this is that it is not feasible to retry each past validation for each new change, which is why we have testing in the first place. Then you’re back at square one because your test writing ability limits your output.

Unless you plan on also vivecoding the tests and treating the whole job as a black box, in which case we might as well just head for the bunkers.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#48

Post by ceejayoz »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #41
ceejayoz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember this same sentiment towards AI when I was growing up, but towards cell phones... Sure. But the same for NFTs. We'll see which one this winds up being.

The value of an NFT is the speculation that a bigger fool than you is in the market (and if you’re average, there is). The value of AI coding is that it can eliminate some of the labor of programming, which is the overwhelming majority of cost. These value propositions are nothing alike.

> The value of an NFT is the speculation that a bigger fool than you is in the market (and if you’re average, there is).

This describes OpenAI’s valuation pretty well.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#50

Post by torben-friis »

Aeolun wrote: post #45
torben-friis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really would like an answer to this. My CTO is currently working on the ability to run several dockerised versions of the codebase in parallel for this kind of flow. I’m here wondering how anyone could work on several tasks at once at a speed where they can read, review and iterate the output of one LLM in the time it takes for another LLM to spit an answer for a different task. Like, are we just asking things as f…

Hmm, I haven’t managed to make it work yet, and I’ve tried. The best I can manage is three completely separate projects, and they all get only divided attention (which is often good enough these days).

Do you feel you get a faster/better end result than focusing on a single task at a time?

I can’t help but feel it’s like texting and driving, where people are overvaluing their ability to function with reduced focus. But obviously I have zero data to back that up.

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