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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

#511

Post by andrekandre »

manmal wrote: post #450
xtracto wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

  > Who’s going to verify all those tests?
why, the user of course

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#512

Post by andrekandre »

pphysch wrote: post #219
mark242 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Automatically solving software application bugs is one thing, recovering stateful business process disasters and data corruption is entirely another thing. Customer A is in an totally unknown database state due to a vibe-coded bug. Great, the bug is fixed now, but you're still f-ed.

  > Automatically solving software application bugs
the other issue is "fixing" false-positives; i've seen it before with some ai tools: they convince you its a bug and it looks legit and passes the tests but later on something doesn't quite work right anymore and you have to triage and revert it... it can be real time sink.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#513

Post by habinero »

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…

Clearing out the digital asbestos is going to make a lot of consultants a lot of money.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#514

Post by camdenreslink »

pinkgolem wrote: post #433
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll probably look like the code version of this, an image run through a LLM 101 times with the directive to create a replica of the input image: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kbj71z/i_tried_th... Despite being provided with explicit instructions, well... People are still wrongly attributing a mind to something that is essentially mindless.

I mean, if you tell a chain of 100 humans to redraw a a picture i would expect it to go similar, just much faster

If you handed a human an image and said please give me back this image totally unmodified, I bet the human could do it.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#515

Post by camdenreslink »

james_marks wrote: post #407
robhlt wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice that AI can fix bugs fast, but it's better to not even have bugs in the first place. By using someone else's battle tested code (like a framework) you can at least avoid the bugs they've already encountered and fixed.

Because frameworks don’t have bugs? Or unpredictable dependency interactions? This is generous, to the say the least.

Well maintained, popular frameworks have github issues that frequently get resolved with newly patched versions of the framework. Sometimes bugs get fixed that you didn't even run into yet so everybody benefits.

Will your bespoke LLM code have that? Every issue will actually be an issue in production experienced by your customers, that will have to be identified (better have good logging and instrumentation), and fixed in your codebase.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#516

Post by habinero »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #494
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll probably look like the code version of this, an image run through a LLM 101 times with the directive to create a replica of the input image: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kbj71z/i_tried_th... Despite being provided with explicit instructions, well... People are still wrongly attributing a mind to something that is essentially mindless.

Mind is irrelevant. We see the features performing before our eyes, it’s wild people deny code gens abilities still.

They do okay-ish for things that don't matter and if you don't look that hard. If you do look, the "features" turn out to be very limited, or not do what they claim or not work at all.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#517

Post by alexpotato »

4nonverbal-alit wrote: post #496
alexpotato wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who has been both a SRE/DevOps from all levels from IC to Global Head of a team: - I 100% believe this is happening and is probably going to be the case in the next 6 months. I've seen Claude and Grok debug issues when they only had half of the relevant evidence (e.g. Given A and B, it's most likely X). It can even debug complex issues between systems using logs, metrics etc. In other words, every…

> Which probably means we are all going to start to be more like airline pilots: Airline pilots are still employed because of regulations. The industry is heavily regulated and the regulations move very slowly because of its international cooperative nature. The regulations dictate how many crew members should be on board for each plane type and other various variables. All the airlines have to abide by the rules of…

The below post is a great explanation of how the airlines are essentially at the mercy of the pilot unions: https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#518

Post by camdenreslink »

goostavos wrote: post #228
MrDarcy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment ignores the key insight of the article. Design is what matters most now. Design is the difference between vibe coding and software engineering. Given a good design, software engineers today are 100x more productive. What they produce is high quality due to the design. Production is fast and cheap due to the agents. You are correct, there will be a reckoning for large scale systems which are vibe coded. T…

>software engineers today are 100x more productive Somebody needs to explain to my lying eyes where these 100xers are hiding. They seem to live in comments on the internet, but I'm not seeing the teams around me increase their output by two orders of magnitude.

I would say I'm like 1.2x more productive, and I think I'm more of the typical case (of course I read all of the code the LLM produces, so maybe that's where I've gone wrong).

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#519

Post by habinero »

skybrian wrote: post #230
pragmatic wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now run that loop 1000 times. What does the code /system look like. It is going to be more like evolution (fit to environment) than engineering (fit to purpose). It will be fascinating to watch nonetheless.

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.

My unpopular opinion is AI sucks at writing tests. Like, really sucks. It can churn out a lot of them, but they're shitty.

Actually writing good tests that exercise the behavior you want, guard against regressions, and isn't overfitted to your code is pretty difficult, really. You need to both understand the function and understand the structure to do it

Even for hobby projects, it's not great. I'm learning asyncio by writing a matrix scraper and writing good functional tests as you go is worth it to make sure you actually do understand the concepts

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#520

Post by habinero »

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…

I vigorously agree with all of this.

It doesn't really matter for hobby projects or demos or whatever, but there's this whole group who thinks they can yell at the computer and have a business fall out and no.

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