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Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

blog.alaindichiappari.dev

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Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#441

Post by rglover »

thephyber wrote: post #439
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,…

I'd say you're absolutely right.

The problem is...what is the distribution of companies who do it "right" to companies that don't?

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#443

Post by cadamsdotcom »

This is an interesting idea but the problem is where to stop as you travel down through layers of frameworks?

Say we take it to an absurd extreme: You probably won’t have your agent code up Verilog and run your website on an ASIC.. and you aren’t going to write an assembler to code up your OS and kernel and all the associated hardware support, so you probably want a server and an OS to run your code and maybe some containers or a process model.. so the agentic reinvention has to stop somewhere.

One helpful mindset is to choose frameworks and components that avoid rediscovery. Tailwind for example contains some very well thought out responsive breakpoints that a ton of thought went into designing. With `:md` which is only a couple of tokens, your agent can make use of all that knowledge without having to reinvent everything that went into those decisions.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#444

Post by Applejinx »

smashed wrote: post #264
skybrian wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if all you ask it to do is fix bugs. You can also ask it to work on code health things like better organization, better testing, finding interesting invariants and enforcing them, and so on. It's up to you what you want to prioritize.

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…

Microsoft will be an excellent real-world experiment on whether this is any good. We so easily forget that giant platform owners are staking everything on all this working exactly as advertised.

Some of my calculations going forward will continue to be along the lines of 'what do I do in the event that EVERYTHING breaks and cannot be fixed'. Some of my day job includes retro coding for retro platforms, though it's cumbersome. That means I'll be able to supply useful things for survivors of an informational apocalypse, though I'm hoping we don't all experience one.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#445

Post by bodge5000 »

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…

> Good time to be in business if you can see through the bs and understand how these systems actually function

You missed out the most crucial and least likely requirement (assuming you're not self employed); management also need to be able to see through the bs.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#446

Post by luckydata »

honestly this blog post was pretty off base. Current AIs have a limited ability to keep up with complexity and using known frameworks helps with managing that complexity. If you need to write everything from scratch every time you have to go through the process of scaffolding and harnessing the whole system from scratch. I don't think it's worth rewriting react from scratch every time you make a browser application, even in the best case it's just a huge waste of tokens.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#447

Post by bodge5000 »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #313
dasil003 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with both you and the GP. Yes, coding is being totally revolutionized by AI, and we don't really know where the ceiling will be (though I'm skeptical we'll reach true AGI any time soon), but I believe there still an essential element of understanding how computer systems work that is required to leverage AI in a sustainable way. There is some combination of curiosity of inner workings and precision of thought…

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.

I get its necessary for investment, but I'd be a lot happier with these tools if we didn't keep making these wild claims, because I'm certainly not seeing 10x the output. When I ask for examples, 90% its claude code (not a beacon of good software anyway but if nearly everyone is pointing to one example it tells you thats the best you can probably expect) and 10% weekend projects, which are cool, but not 10x cool. Opus 4.5 was released in Dec 2025, by this point people should be churning out year long projects in a month, and I certainly haven't seen that.

I've used them a few times, and they're pretty cool. If it was just sold as that (again, couldn't be, see: trillion dollar investments) I wouldn't have nearly as much of a leg to stand on

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#448

Post by zer00eyz »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #413
zer00eyz wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead wrong. Because the world is still filled with problems that would once have been on the wrong side of the is it worth your time matrix ( https://xkcd.com/1205/ ) There are all sorts of things that I, personally, should have automated long ago that I threw at claud to do for me. What was the cost to me? Prompt and a code review. Meanwhile, on larger tasks an LLM deeply integrated into my IDE has been a boon. Havi…

I sort of have a different view of that time matrix. If AI is only able to help me do tasks that are of low value, where I previously wouldn’t have bothered—- is it really saving me anything? Before where I’d simply ignore auxiliary tasks, and focus on what matters, I’m now constantly detoured with them thinking “it’ll only take ten minutes.” I also primarily write Elixir, and I have found most Agents are only capabl…

> are only capable of writing small pieces well.

It excels at this, and if you have it deeply integrated into your workflow and IDE/dev env the loop should feel more like pair programing, like tennis, than it should feel like its doing everything for you.

> I also primarily write Elixir,

I would also venture that it has less to do with the language (it is a factor) and more to do with what you are working on. Domain will matter in terms of sample size (code) and understanding (language to support). There could be 1000s of examples in its training data of what you want, but if no one wrote a commment that accurately describes what that does...

> I think the ease of use of AI can cause us to over produce and as a result we miss the forest for the trees.

This is spot on. I stopped thinking of it as "AI" and started thinking of it as "power tools". Useful, and like a power tool you should be cautious because there is danger there... It isnt smart, it's not doing anything that isnt in its training data, but there is a lot there, everything, and it can do some basic synthesis.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#449

Post by nekitamo »

rglover wrote: post #441
thephyber wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I'd say you're absolutely right. The problem is...what is the distribution of companies who do it "right" to companies that don't?

The same as the distribution of companies which are profitable over time and grow steadily, vs the others which clumsily flail around to somehow stay alive. To the winner go the spoils, and the winners will be a tiny fraction of companies, same as it ever was.

A way I look at it is that all net wealth creation in public companies has come from just 4% of businesses:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2900447

https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/rk4udc/only_4_of...

It'll be similar with software companies. 4% of them will hit on a unique cultural and organizational track which will let them thrive, probably using AI in one form or another. The other 96% will be lucky to stay alive.

Same as it ever was.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#450

Post by manmal »

xtracto wrote: post #322
skybrian wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if all you ask it to do is fix bugs. You can also ask it to work on code health things like better organization, better testing, finding interesting invariants and enforcing them, and so on. It's up to you what you want to prioritize.

I agree but want to interject that "code organization " won't matter for long. Programming Languages were made for people. I'm old enough to have programmed in z80 and 8086 assembler. I've been through plenty of prog.langs. through my career. But once building systems become prompting an agent to build a flow that reads these two types of excels, cleans them,filters them, merges them and outputs the result for the we…

What you’re describing is that we’d turn deterministic engineering into the same march of 9s that FSD and robotics are going through now - but for every single workflow. If you can’t check the code for correctness, and debug it, then your test system must be absolutely perfect and cover every possible outcome. Since that’s not possible for nontrivial software, you’re starting a march of 9s towards 100% correctness of each solution.

That accounting software will need 100M unit tests before you can be certain it covers all your legal requirements. (Hyperbole but you get the idea) Who’s going to verify all those tests? Do you need a reference implementation to compare against?

Making LLM work opaque to inspection is kind of like pasting the outcome of a mathematical proof without any context (which is almost worthless AFAIK).

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