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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

#51

Post by FeteCommuniste »

avidiax wrote: post #43

The author seems to mistake having to update Node.js for a security patch to be a curse rather than a blessing. The alternative is that your bespoke solution has undiscovered security vulnerabilities, probably no security community, and no easy fix for either of those. You get the privilege of patching Node.js. Similarly, as a hiring manager, you can hire a React developer. You can't hire a "proprietary AI coded inte…

Yeah, I really don't get it. So instead of using someone else's framework, you're using an AI to write a (probably inferior and less thoroughly tested and considered) framework. And your robot employee is probably pulling a bunch of stuff (not quite verbatim, of course) from existing relevant open source frameworks anyway. Big whoop?

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#52

Post by chasd00 »

wtetzner wrote: post #39
alainrk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point. My concern is more about the tedious aspects. You could argue that tedium is part of what makes the craft valuable, and there's truth to that. But it comes down to trade-offs, what could I accomplish with that saved time, and would I get more value from those other pursuits?

I think it's still an open question if it's actually a net savings of time.

One thing I’ve noticed is that effort may be saved but not as much time. The agent can certainly type faster than me but I have to sit there and watch it work and then check its work when done. There’s certainly some time savings but not what you think.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#53

Post by abcde666777 »

echelon wrote: post #30
abcde666777 wrote: post #25

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing. 'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his s…

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 development work of the kind you've mentioned - like building web applications.

Nothing wrong with using these tools to deal with that, but I do think that a lot of the folks from those domains lack experience with heavier work, and falsely extrapolate the impact it's having within their domain to be applicable across the board.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#54

Post by echelon »

creata wrote: post #47
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 want to be able to make art and music and movies and games. Then make them. What's stopping you?

I want to live forever and set foot on distant planets in other galaxies.

Got a prescription for that too?

I've made films for fifteen years. I hate the process.

Every one of my friends and colleagues that went to film school found out quickly that their dreams would wither and die on the vine due to the pyramid nature of studio capital allocation and expenditure. Not a lot of high autonomy in that world. Much of it comes with nepotism.

There are so many things I wish to do with technology that I can't because of how much time and effort and energy and money are required.

I wish I could magic together a P2P protocol that replaced centralized social media. I wish I could build a completely open source GPU driver stack. I wish I could make Rust compile faster or create an open alternative to AWS or GCP. I wish for so many things, but I'm not Fabrice Bellard.

I don't want to constrain people to the shitty status quo. Because the status quo is shitty. I want the next generation to have better than the bullshit we put up with. If they have to suffer like we suffered, we failed.

I want the future to climb out of the pit we're in and touch the stars.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#55

Post by matheus-rr »

The pendulum swing described here is real but I think the underlying issue is subtler than "AI vs. no AI."

The actual problem most teams have isn't writing code — it's understanding what the code they already depend on is doing. You can vibe-code a whole app in a weekend, but when one of your 200 transitive dependencies ships a breaking change in a patch release, no amount of AI is going to help you debug why your auth flow suddenly broke.

The skill that's actually becoming more valuable isn't "writing code from scratch" — it's maintaining awareness of the ecosystem you're building on. Knowing when Node ships a security fix that affects your HTTP handling, or when a React minor changes the reconciliation behavior, or when Postgres deprecates a function you use in 50 queries.

That's the boring, unsexy part of engineering that AI doesn't solve and most developers skip until something catches fire.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#56

Post by dgacmu »

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.

Some code is fun and some sucks?

There's a joke that's not entirely a joke that the job of a Google SWE is converting from one protobuf to another. That's generally not very fun code, IMO (which may differ from your opinion and that's why they're opinions!). Otoh, figuring out and writing some interesting logic catches my brain in a way that dealing with formats and interoperability stuff doesn't usually.

We're all did but we all probably have things we like more than others.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#57

Post by pech0rin »

Strange how many people are comparing code to art. Software engineering has never been about the code written, it’s about solving problems with software. With AI we can solve more problems with software. I have been writing code for 25 years, I love using AI. It allows me to get to the point faster.

The author is right, eliminating all this framework cruft will be a boon for building great software. I was a skeptic but it seems obvious now its largely going to be an improvement.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#58

Post by jazzyb »

My biggest concern with AI is that I'm not sure how a software engineer can build up this sort of high-level intuition:

> I still have to deeply think about every important aspect of what I want to build. The architecture, the trade offs, the product decisions, the edge cases that will bite you at 3am.

Without a significant development period of this:

> What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.

A professional mathematician should use every computer aid at their disposal if it's appropriate. But a freshman math major who isn't spending most of their time with just a notebook or chalk board is probably getting in the way of their own progress.

Granted, this was already an issue, to a lesser extent, with the frameworks that the author scorns. It's orders of magnitude worse with generative AI.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#59

Post by FeteCommuniste »

chasd00 wrote: post #52
wtetzner wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's still an open question if it's actually a net savings of time.

One thing I’ve noticed is that effort may be saved but not as much time. The agent can certainly type faster than me but I have to sit there and watch it work and then check its work when done. There’s certainly some time savings but not what you think.

Another thing I've noticed is that using AI, I'm less likely to give existing code another look to see if there's already something in it that does what I need. It's so simple to get the AI to spin up a new class / method that gets close to what I want, so sometimes I end up "giving orders first, asking questions later" and only later realizing that I've duplicated functionality.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#60

Post by wtetzner »

dgacmu wrote: post #56
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.

Some code is fun and some sucks? There's a joke that's not entirely a joke that the job of a Google SWE is converting from one protobuf to another. That's generally not very fun code, IMO (which may differ from your opinion and that's why they're opinions!). Otoh, figuring out and writing some interesting logic catches my brain in a way that dealing with formats and interoperability stuff doesn't usually. We're all d…

I mean, I agree if it's really just "machine translate this code to use the approved method of doing this thing". That seems like a perfect use case for AI. Though one would think Google would already have extensive code mod infrastructure for that kind of thing.

But those aren't the stories you hear about with people coding with AI, which is what prompted my response.

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