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Agents that run while I sleep

claudecodecamp.com

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Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#431

Post by utopiah »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #196
recroad wrote: post #83

Am I supposed to be impressed by this? I think people are now just using agents for the sake of it. I'm perfectly happy running two simple agents, one for writing and one for reviewing. I don't need to go be writing code at faster than light speed. Just focusing on the spec, and watching the agent as it does its work and intervening when it goes sideways is perfectly fine with me. I'm doing 5-7x productivity easily,…

> Am I supposed to be impressed by this? No. But it is noteworthy. A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI. (Granted, everything SWEs complained about being tedious.) From the customer’s perspective, waiting for buggy code tomorrow from San Francisco, buggy code tonight from India or buggy code from an AI at 4AM aren’t super different for maybe two thirds of use cas…

> A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI.

I've never met those people. I've met a LOT of PM who tried. I've met a LOT of entrepreneur who also tried. They never cared, nor even understand, code. They only cared about "value" (and they are not necessarily wrong about it) so now they can "produce" something that does what need until it doesn't. When that's the case then they inexorably go back to someone else (might be a SWE, ironically enough, but might also be someone else like them they shift responsibility to, for money).

Brute force works until you have to backtrack, then it becomes prohibitively expensive until one has to actually grok the problem landscape. It's amazing for toy projects though, maybe.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#432

Post by Verdex »

nananana9 wrote: post #406
KronisLV wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are left with no one who understands a sprawling tangled web of code that is 80% [random people that I can't ask because they don't work here anymore and they didn't care to leave docs or comments] generated, then we'll see who laughs last. Yes, this matches my experience with codebases before AI was a thing.

Yes, but given a feature that should take say 100 lines of code, the average programmer will write in the order of 100 to 500 lines. If they're a heavy OOP user, maybe they'll write 10 classes that total 2000 lines. Regardless, worst case, it will be within ~2 orders of magnitude of a reasonable solution. It's not that they're not trying to write the biggest clusterfuck possible and maximize suffering in the world, i…

Yeah, in the past the limiting factor was the human suffering of the engineer who had to try and fit the sprawling nightmare fuel into their brain.

The machine doesn't suffer. Or if it does nobody cares. People eventually start having panic attacks, the machine can just be reset.

I suspect that the end result is just driving further into the wilderness before reality sets in and you have to call an adult.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#433

Post by eqvinox »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #207
hi_hi wrote: post #206

This _all_ (waves hands around) sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Writing _all_ (waves hands around various llm wrapper git repos) these frameworks and harnesses, built on top of ever changing models sure doesn't feel sensible. I don't know what the best way of using these things is, but from my personal experience, the defaults get me a looong wa…

I am not laughing about PHP. To this very day many of my best projects are built on PHP. And while last 7 years I have spent in full stack JavaScript/TypeScript environment it has never produced the same things I was actually able to do with PHP. I actually feel that things I built 15 years ago in PHP were better than anything I am trying to achieve with modern things that gets outdated every 6 months.

The comparison target for PHP is IMHO a good Python web framework, e.g. Django being the most popular one. I still don't understand how JavaScript is ever considered viable, TypeScript makes it workable I guess…

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#435

Post by owlcompliance »

serial_dev wrote: post #246
hi_hi wrote: post #206

This _all_ (waves hands around) sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Writing _all_ (waves hands around various llm wrapper git repos) these frameworks and harnesses, built on top of ever changing models sure doesn't feel sensible. I don't know what the best way of using these things is, but from my personal experience, the defaults get me a looong wa…

> sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Not if you are an AI gold rush shovel salesman. From the article: > I've run Claude Code workshops for over 100 engineers in the last six months

Bingo.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#437

Post by philipwhiuk »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #409
hi_hi wrote: post #206

This _all_ (waves hands around) sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Writing _all_ (waves hands around various llm wrapper git repos) these frameworks and harnesses, built on top of ever changing models sure doesn't feel sensible. I don't know what the best way of using these things is, but from my personal experience, the defaults get me a looong wa…

It's always the uber conservative and over principled people who laugh about using PHP that have an opinion on everything while not knowing how to get shit done. They're all just tools. You decide how to use them.

Sure but we can agree there's essentially two parallel industries in web development

Engineer at tech firms and WebShops writing WordPress plugins for single clients where Squarespace doesn't cut it.

Is AI another field of people or is it killing one or both of those. TBD

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#438

Post by miningape »

voidUpdate wrote: post #331
misja111 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself, I don't ship any code that I don't fully understand. Yes that requires less autonomous AI and less frequent merging. But I don't even want to think about the disasters that could happen if you really get into the habit of shipping code you can't verify or understand.

Out of interest, what's the speedup between having an LLM write code for you and then having to go through and understand it, vs writing code that you understand immediately because you wrote it?

Not OP but I hold myself to that standard, and the honest answer is that at best it's the same.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#439

Post by EricEspen »

hi_hi wrote: post #206

This _all_ (waves hands around) sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Writing _all_ (waves hands around various llm wrapper git repos) these frameworks and harnesses, built on top of ever changing models sure doesn't feel sensible. I don't know what the best way of using these things is, but from my personal experience, the defaults get me a looong wa…

php still makes money though!

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#440

Post by misja111 »

voidUpdate wrote: post #331
misja111 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself, I don't ship any code that I don't fully understand. Yes that requires less autonomous AI and less frequent merging. But I don't even want to think about the disasters that could happen if you really get into the habit of shipping code you can't verify or understand.

Out of interest, what's the speedup between having an LLM write code for you and then having to go through and understand it, vs writing code that you understand immediately because you wrote it?

It depends. If all I want is some prototype or pet code project, my LLM can write most by itself. The speedup could be 10 times or more. However, if I'd let a LLM write code for my work, I'd have to very thoroughly review it and most likely ask it to rewrite it several times. Each time this would require a new review of course. There would still be a speed up but I guess at most somewhere around 25%.

In practice I try to combine the best of both worlds. I write some code by myself and rely on my LLM for parts that are not too big and where I expect it to do a pretty good job.

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