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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

#431

Post by kaydub »

abcde666777 wrote: post #53
echelon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please forgive me for being blunt, I want to emphasize how much this strikes me. Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules? If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript? There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA c…

I think my take on the matter comes from being a games developer. I work on a lot of code for which agentic programming is less than ideal - code which solves novel problems and sometimes requires a lot of precise performance tuning, and/or often has other architectural constraints. I don't see agentic programming coming to take my lunch any time soon. What I do see it threatening is repetitive quasi carbon copy deve…

I knew nothing about game development a few months ago. Now I've built a simple godot game. I'm sure the game is all pretty common (simple 2d naval combat game) but it's still impressive that a couple claude/gemini/codex cli sessions spit out a working game (admittedly, I'm not a professional artist, so THAT part of it has been painful since I can't rely on generative AI to do that, I have to do it myself with aesprite. But maybe a professional artist would know HOW to prompt for the artwork)

Agentic programming still needs devs/engineers. It's only going to take your lunch if you let it. And by that, I mean the FUD and complete refusal to give good faith attempts to use the ai/llm tools.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#432

Post by kaydub »

wtetzner wrote: post #45
echelon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please forgive me for being blunt, I want to emphasize how much this strikes me. Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules? If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript? There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA c…

> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. > The future is exciting. Not the GP, but I honestly wanted to be excited about LLMs. And they do have good uses. But you quickly start to see the cracks in them, and they just aren't nearly as exciting as I thought they'd be. And a lot of the coding workflows people are using just don't seem that productive or valuable to me. AI just isn't solv…

What hard problems are you working on?

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#433

Post by pinkgolem »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #394
pragmatic wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now run that loop 1000 times. What does the code /system look like. It is going to be more like evolution (fit to environment) than engineering (fit to purpose). It will be fascinating to watch nonetheless.

It'll probably look like the code version of this, an image run through a LLM 101 times with the directive to create a replica of the input image: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kbj71z/i_tried_th... Despite being provided with explicit instructions, well... People are still wrongly attributing a mind to something that is essentially mindless.

I mean, if you tell a chain of 100 humans to redraw a a picture i would expect it to go similar, just much faster

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#434

Post by tsycho »

SoftTalker wrote: post #186
geophile wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> instructing once and for all my setup to do what I want next time. This works up to a point, but eventually your "setup" gets complicated, some of your demands conflict, or have different priorities, and you're relying on the AI to sort it out the way you expect.

But setups get equally complicated, even with human software engineers. The approach that the OP is talking about applies only to experienced, good architect-level SWEs, and I suspect that the code quality and its problems are going to be the same whether they are directing LLMs vs a set of junior SWEs to write the code.

There is an inherent level of complexity in projects that solve some real world problem, due to all the code handling edge cases that were added incrementally over time.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#435

Post by NitpickLawyer »

skybrian wrote: post #360
smashed wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some healthy skepticism on this claim though. Maybe, but there will be a point of diminishing returns where these refactors introduce more problems than they solve and just cause more AI spending. Code is always a liability. More code just means more problems. There has never been a code generating tool that was any good. If you can have a tool generate the code, it means you can write something on a higher le…

"What can we do to reduce the size of the codebase" seems like an interesting prompt to try.

There's an interesting phenomenon I noticed with the "skeptics". They're constantly using what-ifs (aka goalpost moving), but the interesting thing is that those exact same what-ifs were "solved" earlier, but dismissed as "not good enough".

This exact thing about optimisation has been shown years ago. "Here's a function, make it faster". With "glue" to test the function, and it kinda worked even with GPT4 era models. Then came alphaevolve where google found improvements in real algorithms (both theoretical i.e. packing squares and practical i.e. ML kernels). And yet these were dismissed as "yeah, but that's just optimisation, that's easyyyy. Wake me up when they write software from 0 to 1 and it works".

Well, here we are. We now have a compiler that can compile and boot linux! And people are complaining that the code is unmaintainable and that it's slow / unoptimised. We've gone full circle, but forgot that optimisation was easyyyy. Now it's something to complain about. Oh well...

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#436

Post by kaydub »

wtetzner wrote: post #427
kaydub wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You haven't worked somewhere where you're working on multiple different microservices each written by different teams in different languages?

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#437

Post by kaydub »

rglover wrote: post #422
kaydub wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

The arrogance to think this isn't possible using llm tools and that the opposite didn't already exist at plenty of software shops pre-llm tools...

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#438

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

hakunin wrote: post #346
philipswood wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build systems may be deterministic in the narrow sense you use, but significant extra effort is required to make them reproducible. Engineering in the broader sense often deals with managing the outputs of variable systems to get known good outcomes to acceptable tolerances. Edit: added second paragraph

I'm not using a narrow sense. There is no elasticity here. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_system > significant extra effort is required to make them reproducible. Zero extra effort is required. It is reproducible. The same input produces the same output. The "my machine" in "Works on my machine" is an example of input. > Engineering in the broader sense often deals with managing the outputs of variab…

If we want to get really narrow I'd say real determinism is possible only in abstract systems, to which you'd reply it's just my ignorance of all possible factors involved and hence the incompleteness of the model. To which I'd point of practical limitations involved with that. And that reason, even though it is incorrect and I don't use it in this way, I understand why some people are using the quantifiers more/less with the term "deterministic", probably for the lack of a better construct.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#439

Post by thephyber »

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…

This sounds entirely too doomer.

There will obviously be companies that build a vibe coded app which too many people depend on. There will be some iteration (maybe feature addition, maybe bug fix) which will cause a catastrophic breakage and users will know.

But there will also be companies who add a better mix of incantations to the prompts, who use version control and CI, who ensure the code is matched with tests, who maintain the prompts and requirements documents.

The former will likely follow your projected path. The latter will do fine and may even thrive better than either traditional software houses of cheap vibe coding shops.

Then again, there are famous instances of companies who have tolerated terribly low investment in IT, including SouthWest Airlines.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#440

Post by rglover »

bthornbury wrote: post #244
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…

Why does there seem to be such a divide in opinions on AI in coding? Meanwhile those who "get it" have been improving their productivity for literally years now.

I've been using it every day for nearly two years now, with your suggested productivity boost observed.

The difference is that I'm not just letting agents willy nilly commit code. I treat them more like a companion and guide their steps (I use Cline w/ Sonnet/Opus 4.5/4.6). Not only do I save a ton of money on tokens, but the results end up being infinitely better than the "yolo" mode outcomes (even with excellent prompting/context).

From my POV, the only divide is between a willingness to be an accountable professional versus someone who just "lets the AI do it" and whistles-with-hands-in-pockets when that code inevitably blows up in a way you couldn't predict (because you weren't checking, only the AI was, which you swore was "good enough").

That approach works if you're just sitting on your couch hacking up toys to dice roll on X. But if you're trying to build reliable, deterministic systems that aren't constantly buzzing you awake at 3am, you're asking for a serious humbling if no one in your organization can explain how or why anything your business relies on works the way it does (that's operationally suicidal, imo, but hey—America).

That gets misinterpreted as being a "luddite," when really it's just having been down the rabbit hole enough times to know that if you can't point to and understand why it's happening (and ideally, whodunit), you don't know shit.

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