Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Beyond agentic coding

haskellforall.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 96 posts

Re: Beyond agentic coding

#51

Post by nakedneuron »

eigenblake wrote: post #22

I have been considering what it would be like to give each function name a specific color and a color for each variable's type followed by a color derived from the hash of the symbol name and keywords would each be their specific type. And essentially printing a matrix of this, essentially transforming your code into a printable matrix "low-lod" or "mipmap" form. This could be implemented like the VSCode minimap but…

Great idea. As a "visual type" this would be so much more intuitive to decipher. I prefer TUIs over GUI exactly because they're simpler and work hard to focus on the essential. This is low hanging fruit to enhance TUIs.

Re: Beyond agentic coding

#52

Post by jasonjmcghee »

WilcoKruijer wrote: post #44

> You could take an editor session, a diff, or a pull request and automatically split it into a series of more focused commits that are easier for people to review. This is one of the cases where the AI can reduce human review labor I feel this should be a bigger focus than it is. All the AI code review start up are mostly doing “hands off” code review. It’s just an agent reviewing everything. Why not have an agent c…

Yes please. There are many use cases where failure modes are similar to not using AI at all, which is useful.

Many very low risk applications of AI can add up to high payoff without high risk.

Re: Beyond agentic coding

#53

Post by telotortium »

WilcoKruijer wrote: post #44

> You could take an editor session, a diff, or a pull request and automatically split it into a series of more focused commits that are easier for people to review. This is one of the cases where the AI can reduce human review labor I feel this should be a bigger focus than it is. All the AI code review start up are mostly doing “hands off” code review. It’s just an agent reviewing everything. Why not have an agent c…

Unfortunately GitHub doesn’t let you easily review commits in a PR. You can easily selectively review files, but comments are assumed to apply to the most recent HEAD of the PR branch. This is probably why review agents don’t natively use that workflow. It would probably not be hard to instruct the released versions of Opus or Codex to do this, however, particularly if you can generate a PR plan, either via human or model.

Re: Beyond agentic coding

#54

Post by SatvikBeri »

WilcoKruijer wrote: post #44

> You could take an editor session, a diff, or a pull request and automatically split it into a series of more focused commits that are easier for people to review. This is one of the cases where the AI can reduce human review labor I feel this should be a bigger focus than it is. All the AI code review start up are mostly doing “hands off” code review. It’s just an agent reviewing everything. Why not have an agent c…

I do this. For example, the other day I made a commit where I renamed some fields of a struct and removed others, then I realized it would be easier to review if those were two separate commits. But it was hard to split them out mechanically, so I asked Claude to do it, creating two new commits whose end result must match the old one and must both past tests. It works quite well.

Re: Beyond agentic coding

#55

Post by Narciss »

I did a bit of digging into why you think agentic coding is “not there yet”, and I think you are bashing a tool you have very little experience with and are using a bit wrongly.

Nothing wrong with that, except that as opposed to any other tool that is out there, agentic coding is approached by smart senior engineers that would otherwise spend time reading documentation and understanding a new package/tool/framework before giving conclusions around it with “I spun up Claude code and it’s not working”. Dunno why the same level of diligence isn’t applied to agentic coding as well.

First question that I always have to such engineers is “what model have you tried?” And it always ends up being the non-SOTA models for tasks that are not simple. Have you tried Claude Opus?

Second question: have you tried plan mode?

And then I politely ask them to read some documentation on using these tools, because the simplicity of the chat interface is deceptive.

Re: Beyond agentic coding

#56

Post by rubenflamshep »

andai wrote: post #19

I wonder if the problem of idle time / waiting / breaking flow is a function of the slowness. That would be simple to test, because there are super fast 1000 tok/s providers now. (Waiting for Cerebras coding plan to stop being sold out ;) I've used them for smaller tasks (making small edits), and the "realtime" aspect of it does provide a qualitative difference. It stops being async and becomes interactive. A suffici…

> That said, the main issue I find with agentic is my mental model getting desynchronized. No matter how fast the models get, it takes a fixed amount of time for me to catch up and understand what they've done.

This is why I'm so skeptical of anyone running 6+ Claude sessions at a time. I've gotten to 5 but really that was across 3 sessions with 2 standing by just to commit stuff. And even with just 3 sessions I constantly lost where I was and wasted time re-orienting myself, doing work in the wrong session, etc.

>The most enjoyable way I've found of staying synced is to stay in the driver's seat, and to command many small rapid edits manually.

Same, there's a fantastic flow state/momentum I can get in a single session just knocking off features. I don't mind switching between two sessions in this state but the experience is better when it's two different projects vs two different features on the same project. The complete context switch lets be re-orient more easily

Re: Beyond agentic coding

#57

Post by zazibar »

Narciss wrote: post #55

I did a bit of digging into why you think agentic coding is “not there yet”, and I think you are bashing a tool you have very little experience with and are using a bit wrongly. Nothing wrong with that, except that as opposed to any other tool that is out there, agentic coding is approached by smart senior engineers that would otherwise spend time reading documentation and understanding a new package/tool/framework b…

A "you're holding it wrong" with the implication that the author is a bad engineer as the cherry on top. Brilliant stuff.

Re: Beyond agentic coding

#58

Post by mjburgess »

Narciss wrote: post #55

I did a bit of digging into why you think agentic coding is “not there yet”, and I think you are bashing a tool you have very little experience with and are using a bit wrongly. Nothing wrong with that, except that as opposed to any other tool that is out there, agentic coding is approached by smart senior engineers that would otherwise spend time reading documentation and understanding a new package/tool/framework b…

VibeTFM

Re: Beyond agentic coding

#59

Post by cyanydeez »

BitsAndObjects wrote: post #41
tuhgdetzhh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and that constraint shows up surprisingly early. Even if you eliminate model latency and keep yourself fully in sync via a tight human-in-the-loop workflow, the shared mental model of the team still advances at human speed. Code review, design discussion, and trust-building are all bandwidth-limited in ways that do not benefit much from faster generation. There is also an asymmetry: local flow can be optimized a…

This thread seems to have re-identified Amdahl’s law in the context of software development workflow. Agentic coding is only speeding up or parallelising a small part of the workflow - the rest is still sequential and human-driven.

And its abstracted as

Mythical Man Month -> Mythical Agent Swarm

Re: Beyond agentic coding

#60

Post by wazHFsRy »

WilcoKruijer wrote: post #44

> You could take an editor session, a diff, or a pull request and automatically split it into a series of more focused commits that are easier for people to review. This is one of the cases where the AI can reduce human review labor I feel this should be a bigger focus than it is. All the AI code review start up are mostly doing “hands off” code review. It’s just an agent reviewing everything. Why not have an agent c…

> Why not have an agent create a perfect “review plan” for human consumption? Split the review up in parts that can be individually (or independently) reviewed and then fixed by the coding agent. Have a proper ordering in files (GitHub shows files in a commit alphabetically, which is suboptimal), and hide boring details like function implementations that can be easily unit tested.

Yes exactly! I have been using this to create a comment on the PR, showing suggested review order and a diagram of how changes relate to each other. And even this super simple addition has been very helpful for code review so far!

(more on this: https://www.dev-log.me/pr_review_navigator_for_claude/)

Post reply on HN