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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

#471

Post by phendrenad2 »

This is interesting, because I've been going the other way: Using coding agents to write MORE abstraction layers. This is because I realized that, just like humans, in fact even more so, language models struggle to keep the whole stack in mind at once. See for yourself: Try having your agent write a CRUD app in Ruby or Python (no Rails, no Django), and then try it again with Rails or Django. It'll be a lot more productive and error-free the second time.

However, I think I understand where the author's coming from based on this line:

> I’ve been building a product from the ground up. Not the “I spun up a Next.js template” kind of ground up

Next.JS is the pinnacle of JavaScript-on-the-backend frameworks, and it's kind of pathetic compared to what Rails or Django give you. You still have a lot of thinking to do, so I posit (as I have for some time) that using Next.JS vs using NodeJS directly gives humans very little productivity boost. I think people just know that frameworks are a good thing in general, and never realized that the JavaScript offerings weren't that powerful.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#473

Post by xnx »

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…

Possible, but this sounds like motivated reasoning.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#474

Post by latexr »

beoberha wrote: post #308
omnicognate wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What point have we reached? All I see is HN drowning in insufferable, identical-sounding posts about how everything has changed forever. Meanwhile at work, in a high stakes environment where software not working as intended has actual consequences, there are... a few new tools some people like using and think they may be a bit more productive with. And the jury's still out even on that. The initial excitement of LLMs…

> The initial excitement of LLMs has significantly cooled off, the model releases show rapidly diminishing returns if not outright equilibrium and the only vibe-coded software project I've seen get any actual public use is Claude Code, which is riddled with embarrassing bugs its own developers have publicly given up on fixing. The only thing I see approaching any kind of singularity is the hype. I am absolutely baffl…

> I work in an objectively high stakes environment (Big 3 cloud database provider) and we are finally (post Opus 4.5) seeing the models and tools become good enough to drive the vast majority of our coding work

Please name it. If it’s that good, you shouldn’t be ashamed of doing so and we can all judge by ourselves how the quality of the service evolves.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#475

Post by brightball »

mark242 wrote: post #215
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…

I would argue that it's going to be the opposite. At re:Invent, one of the popular sessions was in creating a trio of SRE agents, one of which did nothing but read logs and report errors, one of which did analysis of the errors and triaged and proposed fixes, and one to do the work and submit PRs to your repo. Then, as part of the session, you would artificially introduce a bug into the system, then run into the bug…

Was that session published online somewhere? I’d love to watch that.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#476

Post by JackSlateur »

feastingonslop wrote: post #292
harrisi wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The aspect of "potentially secure/stable code" is very interesting to me. There's an enormous amount of code that aren't secure or stable already (I'd argue virtually all of the code in existence). This has already been a problem. There's no real ramifications for it. Even for something like Cloudflare stopping a significant amount of Internet traffic for any amount of time is not (as far as I know) investigated in a…

Nobody is saying to skip testing the software. Testing is still important. What the code itself looks like, isn’t.

Knowing the inner working of a complex system is a hard requirement of its testing.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#477

Post by steve_adams_86 »

This gives me "anyone can run their online presence with WordPress" vibes, back at the beginning of my career when I spent a lot of time repairing people's broken, exploited, corrupted websites. We saw an explosion of people creating websites, but even with the guard rails of a framework like WordPress it turned into a total mess. Now we've thrown out the guard rails.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#478

Post by drcode »

kgeist wrote: post #383
drcode wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no fan of AI in terms of its long term consequences, but being able to "just do things" with the aid of AI tools, diving head first into the most difficult programming projects, is going to improve the human programming skills worldwide to levels never before imaginable

>is going to improve the human programming skills worldwide to levels never before imaginable "We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand" https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...

my comment is that it lowers the threshold to "just doing things"

An experiment where people "HAVE TO DO something" either way is testing something different

I know a fair amount about native android app development now because of using AI to build several native apps. I would know zero about about native android development if I had never attempted to build a native android app.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#479

Post by skybrian »

anon22981 wrote: post #461
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I use LLM’s daily and agents occasionally. They are useful, but there is no need to move any goal posts; they easily do shit work still in 2026. All my coworkers use agents extensively in the backend and the amount of shit code, bad tests and bugs has skyrocketed. Couple that with a domain (medicine) where our customer in some cases needs to validate the application’s behaviour extensively and it’s a fucking disaster…

I think we have some pretty good power tools now, but using them appropriately is a skill issue, and some people are learning to use them in a very expensive way.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#480

Post by scotty79 »

bodge5000 wrote: post #447
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.

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. Opu…

Have you seen moltbook? One dude coded reddit clone for bots in less the a week. How is it not at least 10x of what was achievable in pre-ai world?

Granted he left the db open to public, but some meat powered startups did exactly the same few years ago.

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