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Eight more months of agents

crawshaw.io

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Re: Eight more months of agents

#41

Post by bdangubic »

63 wrote: post #28

I have no problem with experienced senior devs using agents to write good code faster. What I have a problem with is inexperienced "vibecoders" who don't care to learn and instead use agents to write awful buggy code that will make the product harder to build on even for the agents. It used to be that lack of a basic understanding of the system was a barrier for people, but now it's not, so we're flooded with code wr…

the number of experienced, senior programmers though, who are in “anti-LLM” camp, is still fairly staggering.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#42

Post by uludag »

> I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing.

It might be just me but this reads as very tone deaf. From my perspective, CEOs are seething at the mouth to make as many developers redundant as possible, not being shy about this desire. (I don't see this at all as inevitable, but tech leaders have made their position clear)

Like, imagine the smugness of some 18th century "CEO" telling an artisan, despite the fact that he'l be resigned to working in horrific conditions at a factory, to not worry and think of all the mass produced consumer goods he may enjoy one day.

It's not at all a stretch of the imagination that current tech workers may be in a very precarious situation. All the slopware in the world wouldn't console them.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#43

Post by anthuswilliams »

dmk wrote: post #11

The real insight buried in here is "build what programmers love and everyone will follow." If every user has an agent that can write code against your product, your API docs become your actual product. That's a massive shift.

I'm very much looking forward to this shift. It is SO MUCH more pro-consumer than the existing SaaS model. Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation. It feels like every time I ask for programmatic access to SaaS tools in order to simplify a workflow, I get stuck in endless meetings with product managers trying to "understand my use case", even for products explicitly marketed to programmers.

Using agents that interact with APIs represents people being able to own their user experience more. Why not craft a frontend that behaves exactly the the way YOU want it to, tailor made for YOUR work, abstracting the set of products you are using and focusing only on the actual relevant bits of the work you are doing? Maybe a downside might be that there is more explicit metering of use in these products instead of the per-user licensing that is common today. But the upside is there is so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#44

Post by remich »

derefr wrote: post #25
happytoexplain wrote: post #4

I don't trust the idea of "not getting", "not understanding", or "being out of touch" with anti-LLM (or pro-LLM) sentiment. There is nothing complicated about this divide. The pros and cons are both as plain as anything has ever been. You can disagree - even strongly - with either side. You can't "not understand".

The negative impacts of generative AI are most sharply being felt by "creatives" (artists, writers, musicians, etc), and the consumers in those markets. If the OP here is 1. a programmer 2. who works solely with other programmers and 3. who is "on the grind", mostly just consuming non-fiction blog-post content related to software development these days, rather than paying much attention to what's currently happening…

I think this is an interesting point, my one area of disagreement is that there is no "anti-LLM sentiment" in the programming community. Sure, plenty of folks expressing skepticism or disagreement are doing so from a genuine place, but just in reading this site and a few email newsletters I get I can say that there is a non-trivial percent in the programming world who are adamantly opposed to LLMs/AI. When I see comments from people in that subset, it's quite clear that they aren't approaching it from a place of skepticism, where they could be convinced given appropriate evidence or experiences.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#45

Post by overgard »

derefr wrote: post #25
happytoexplain wrote: post #4

I don't trust the idea of "not getting", "not understanding", or "being out of touch" with anti-LLM (or pro-LLM) sentiment. There is nothing complicated about this divide. The pros and cons are both as plain as anything has ever been. You can disagree - even strongly - with either side. You can't "not understand".

The negative impacts of generative AI are most sharply being felt by "creatives" (artists, writers, musicians, etc), and the consumers in those markets. If the OP here is 1. a programmer 2. who works solely with other programmers and 3. who is "on the grind", mostly just consuming non-fiction blog-post content related to software development these days, rather than paying much attention to what's currently happening…

> "Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent.

Strong disagree right there. I remember talking to a (developer) coworker a few months ago who seemed like the biggest AI proponent on our team. When we were one-on-one during a lunch though, he revealed that he really doesn't like AI that much at all, he's just afraid to speak up against it. I'm in a few Discord channels with a lot of highly skilled (senior and principal programmers) who mostly work in game development (or adjacent), and most of them either mock LLMs or have a lot of derision for it. Hacker News is kind of a weird pro-AI bubble, most other places are not nearly as keen on this stuff.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#46

Post by blibble »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #40
post-it wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm just lucky that my colleagues all have Uni degrees in CS and at least a few years experience. That's why. I was using Claude the other day to greenfield a side project and it wanted to do some important logic on the frontend that would have allowed unauthenticated users to write into my database. It was easy to spot for me , because I've been writing software for years, and it only took a single prompt to…

You can also ask Claude to review all the code for security issues and code smells, you'd be surprised what it finds. We all write insecure code in our first pass through if we're too focused on getting the proof of concept worked out, security isnt always the very 1st thing coded, maybe its the very next thing, maybe it comes 10 changes later.

> We all write insecure code in our first pass through

no, we don't

Re: Eight more months of agents

#48

Post by remich »

63 wrote: post #28

I have no problem with experienced senior devs using agents to write good code faster. What I have a problem with is inexperienced "vibecoders" who don't care to learn and instead use agents to write awful buggy code that will make the product harder to build on even for the agents. It used to be that lack of a basic understanding of the system was a barrier for people, but now it's not, so we're flooded with code wr…

We're in a transition phase, but this will shake out in the near future. In the non-professional space, poorly built vibecoded apps simply won't last, for any number of reasons. When it comes to professional devs, this is a problem that is solved by a combination of tooling, process, and management:

(1) Tooling to enable better evaluation of generated code and its adherence to conventions and norms (2) Process to impose requirements on the creation/exposure of PRDs/prompts/traces (3) Management to guide devs in the use of the above and to implement concrete rewards and consequences

Some organizations will be exposed as being deficient in some or all of these areas, and they will struggle. Better organizations will adapt.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#49

Post by overgard »

uludag wrote: post #42

> I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing. It might be just me but this reads as very tone deaf. From my perspective, CEOs are seething at the mouth to make as many developers redundant as possible, not being shy about…

I bought Steve Yegge's "Vibe Coding" book. I think I'm about 1/4th of the way through it or so. One thing that surprised me is there's this naivete on display that workers are going to be the ones to reap the benefits of this. Like, Steve was using an example of being able to direct the agent while doing leisure activities (never mind that Steve is more of an executive/thought leader in this company, and, prior to LLMs, seemed to be out of the business of writing code). That's a nice snapshot of a reality that isn't going to persist..

While the idea of programmers working two hours a day and spending the rest of it with their family seems sunny, that's absolutely not how business is going to treat it.

Thought experiment... CEO has a team of 8 engineers. They do some experiments with AI, and they discover that their engineers are 2x more effective on average . What does the CEO do?

a) Change the workweek to 4 hours a day so that all the engineers have better work/life balance since the same amount of work is being done.

b) Fire half the engineers, make the 4 remaining guys pick up the slack, rinse and repeat until there's one guy left?

Like, come on. There's pushback on this stuff not because the technology is bad, (although it's overhyped), but because the no sane person trusts our current economic system to provide anything resembling humane treatment of workers. The super rich are perfectly fine seeing half the population become unemployed, as far as I can tell, as long as their stock numbers go up.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#50

Post by esafak »

gradus_ad wrote: post #19
Herring wrote: post #18

> In 2000, less than one percent lived on farms and 1% of workers are in agriculture. That was a net benefit to the world, that we all don't have to work to eat. The jury's still out on that one, because climate change is an existential risk.

Existential? Maybe to beachfront property owners

Did you know that 10% of the world's population lives in coastal zones at low elevations?
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