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Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

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Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#421

Post by killerstorm »

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…

Software engineers have been confidently wrong about a lot of things.

E.g. OOP and "patterns" in 90s. What was the last time you implemented a "visitor"?

P. Norvig mentioned most of the patterns are transparent in Common Lisp: e.g. you can just use a `lambda` instead of "visitor". But OOP people kept doing class diagrams for a simple map or fold-like operation.

AI producing a flawed code and "not understanding" are completely different issues. Yes, AI can make mistakes, we know. But are you certain your understanding is really superior?

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#422

Post by rglover »

kaydub wrote: post #325
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…

The hubris is with the devs that think like you actually.

Carefully, patiently, and intentionally in the direction of stability and good user experience?

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#423

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#424

Post by kaydub »

wtetzner wrote: post #41
n4r9 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pain can mean tedium rather than intellectual challenge.

I really struggle to understand how people can find coding more tedious than prompting. To each their own I guess.

How long have you been coding? How many languages and frameworks have you worked with? Where has your professional focus been?

I've written professional code in production for the past 15+ years in VB, C# (MVC2/MVC3 + Razor), Php(Yii, Yii2, Symfony), Perl, Python(Flask, Cherrpy), Java(Spring MVC, Spring boot, JSF, J2EE), Golang, Rust, Ruby. I've worked on build/ci pipelines from Jenkins, CircleCI, Github, Gitlab, Teamcity, etc. I've had to deploy/manage infrastructure from bare metal to the cloud with Ansible, Puppet, Saltstack, Terraform, Cloudformation. I've had to run on MySQL, Postgres, Mariadb, SQL Server and use ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, SNS, MSK, Kinesis (of all flavors). I could literally keep going and going and going.

I'm tired. It's way easier to prompt than keep track of all this shit at this point. I don't need to know how to implement $feature or $tool in each and every framework, I'll let the machines worry about that.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#425

Post by mattlondon »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #357
athrowaway3z wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Id wager my life savings that devs aren’t even 1.5x more productive using these tools.

Even if I am only slightly more productive, it feels like I am flying. The mental toll is severely reduced and the feel good factor of getting stuff done easily (rather than as a slog) is immense. That's got to be worth something in terms of the mental wellbeing of our profession.

FWIW I generally treat the AI as a pair programmer. It does most of the typing and I ask it why it did this? Is that the most idiomatic way of doing it? That seems hacky. Did you consider edge case foo? Oh wait let's call it a BarWidget not a FooWidget - rename everything in all other code/tests/make/doc files Etc etc.

I save a lot of time typing boilerplate, and I find myself more willing (and a lot less grumpy!!!) to bin a load of things I've been working on but then realise is the wrong approach or if the requirements change (in the past I might try to modify something I'd been working on for a week rather than start from scratch again, with AI there is zero activation energy to start again the right way). Thats super valuable in my mind.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#426

Post by Culonavirus »

Dumbest take I've seen in a while. Really. If anything, AI working with frameworks is making them more effective. Frameworks, by definition, produce more structure, than just the language + libs do, and their entire practical utility is to abstract away complexity and lower the amount of footguns. The ultimate form of abstracting away complexity is an AI agent/coder writing the code for you. But there are gazillions of solutions (and opinionated ones) out there, for gazillions of all kinds of problems... having an AI agent work within the constraints of a framework is going to be a good thing in almost all cases as it will be more focused on your problem space rather than figuring out how to send freaking bits between computers.

How do people not understand that even if AI is writing all your code you still want to have as little code as possible for a given problem solution that you have to manage yourself? Frameworks help with that.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#427

Post by wtetzner »

kaydub wrote: post #424
wtetzner wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really struggle to understand how people can find coding more tedious than prompting. To each their own I guess.

How long have you been coding? How many languages and frameworks have you worked with? Where has your professional focus been? I've written professional code in production for the past 15+ years in VB, C# (MVC2/MVC3 + Razor), Php(Yii, Yii2, Symfony), Perl, Python(Flask, Cherrpy), Java(Spring MVC, Spring boot, JSF, J2EE), Golang, Rust, Ruby. I've worked on build/ci pipelines from Jenkins, CircleCI, Github, Gitlab, Tea…

I've been writing professional code for 20 years at this point, using many languages, libraries, frameworks, etc. But I certainly don't use them all at the same time.

This also just feels like we're solving the wrong problem. Using AI doesn't fix any of it, it just makes it easier to make the problem worse faster.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#428

Post by leptons »

layer8 wrote: post #291
tenthirtyam wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My expectation is that there'll never be a single bust-up moment, no line-in-the-sand beyond which we'll be able to say "it doesn't work anymore." Instead agent written code will get more and more complex, requiring more and more tokens (& NPU/GPU/RAM) to create/review/debug/modify, and will rapidly pass beyond any hope of a human understanding even for relatively simple projects (e.g. such as a banking app on your p…

Maybe software systems will become more like biological organisms. Huge complexity with parts bordering on chaos, but still working reasonably well most of the time, until entropy takes its course.

It's already like that, for a long time. Humans are quite capable of creating complex systems that become unwieldy the bigger they get. No one person can understand all of it. I will offer the AT&T billing system as an example that I'm all too familiar with as a customer, due to the pain it causes me. So many ridiculous problems with that system, it's been around a long time, and it is just so screwball.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#430

Post by zmmmmm »

geophile wrote: post #178
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…

The article gets at this briefly and moves on: "I can do all of this with the experience on my back of having laid the bricks, spread the mortar, cut and sewn for twenty years. If I don’t like something, I can go in, understand it and fix it as I please, instructing once and for all my setup to do what I want next time." I think this dynamic applies to any use of AI, or indeed, any form of outsourcing. You can outsou…

It does beg, the question , whether any of this applies to less experienced people. I have a hunch that the open-ended nature of what can be achieved with AI will actually lead right back to needing frameworks, just as much as we do now, if not more, when it comes to less experienced people.
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