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Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

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Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#531

Post by yoyonamite »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #378
scoofy wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent Dry January working on a new coding project and since all my nerd friends have been telling me to try to code with LLM's I gave it a shot and signed up to Google Gemini... All I can say is "holy shit, I'm a believer." I've probably got close to a year's worth of coding done in a month and a half. Busy work that would have taken me a day to look up, figure out, and write -- boring shit like matplotlib illustra…

What kind of project / prompts - what’s working for you? /I spent a good 20 years in the software world but have been away doing other things professionally for couple years. Recently was in the same place as you, with a new project and wanting to try it out. So I start with a generic Django project in VSCode, use the agent mode, and… what a waste of time. The auto-complete suggestions it makes are frequently wrong,…

I don't use VSCode, but I've heard that the default model isn't that great. I'd make sure you're using something like Opus 4.5/4.6. I'm not familiar enough with VSCode to know if it's somehow worse than Claude Code, even with the same models, but can test Claude Code to rule that out. It could also be you've stumbled upon a problem that the AI isn't that good at. For example, I was diagnosing a C++ build issue, and I could tell the AI was off track.

Most of the people that get wowed use an AI on a somewhat difficult task that they're unfamiliar with. For me, that was basically a duplicate of Apple's Live Captions that could also translate. Other examples I've seen are repairing a video file, or building a viewer for a proprietary medical imaging format. For my captions example, I don't think I would have put in the time to work on it without AI, and I was able to get a working prototype within minutes and then it took maybe a couple more hours to get it running smoother.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#532

Post by coldtea »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #526
coldtea wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any semi-capable coder could build a Reddit clone by themselves in a week since forever. It's a glorified CRUD app. The barrier to creating a full blown Reddit the huge scaling, not the functionality. But with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and backends like S3, CF etc, this hasn't been a barrier since a decade or more, either.

I think you’re wrong in several ways. Even capable coders can’t create a Reddit clone in a week. Because it’s not just a glorified CRUD app. And I encourage you to think a bit harder before arguing like that. Yes you can create a CRUD app in some kind of framework and style it like Reddit. But that’s like putting lines on your lawn and calling it a clone of the Bernabeu. But even if you were right, the real barrier t…

>Because it’s not just a glorified CRUD app

In what way (that's not related to the difficulty of scaling it, which I already addressed separately)?

The point of my comment was:

"Somebody with AI cloning Reddit in a week is not as special as you make it to be, all things considering. A Reddit clone is not that difficult, it's basically a CRUD app. The difficult part of replicating it, or at least all the basics of it, is its scaling - and even that wouldn't be as difficult for a dev in 2026, the era of widespread elastic cloud backends".

The Bernabeu analogy handwavingly assumes that Reddit is more challenging than a homegrown clone, but doesn't address in what way Reddit differs from a CRUD app, and how my comment doesn't hold.

And even if it did, it would be moot regarding the main point I make, unless the recent AI-clone also handles those differentiating non-CRUD elements and thus also differs from a CRUD app.

>But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction.

True, but not relevant to my point, which is about the difficulty of cloning Reddit coding-wise, not business wise, and whether it's or isn't any great feat for someone using AI to do it.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#533

Post by _zagj »

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…

It's crazy how many developers are starry-eyed optimists about all of this, just casually assuming that they'll still be highly-paid, well-respected professionals ("we'll be like pilots, mostly monitoring the autopilot") if this technology doesn't hit a wall in the next year or two, despite lacking any of the legal protections that other professions enjoy.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#534

Post by _zagj »

pron wrote: post #460
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…

> Unless you are only ever a single engineer, your career is filled with "I need to debug code I didn't write". True, but there's usually at least one person who knows that particular part of the system that you need to touch, and if there isn't, you'll spend a lot of time fixing that bug and become that person. The bet you're describing is that the AI will be the expert, and if it can be that, why couldn't it also b…

> Steve Yegge recently wrote about an exponential growth in AI capabilities

I'm not sure that the current growth rate is exponential, but the problem is that it doesn't need to be exponential. It should have been obvious the moment ChatGPT and stable diffusion-based systems were released that continued, linear progress of these models was going to cause massive disruption eventually (in a matter of years).

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#535

Post by exe34 »

skydhash wrote: post #508
exe34 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so glad software engineering isn't my job. I love solving problems, and I'm somewhat better at using code to do it than my peers (fellow scientists), but I would hate to have a boss/client that says "it needs to do X" and the framework writer (or SDK, ala Android/Xcode) say "no, that hurts my profits/privacy busting".

I've never found something that was impossible to implement in any framework or SDK. Even in Android SDK land, you can easily get access to an OpenGL surface and import the whole world via the NDK. There's nothing limiting other than the OS itself and its mechanism. Same with Web framework. Even React (a library) has its escape hatches to let in the rest of the world.

okay, push notification without going through firebase. go!

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#536

Post by discreteevent »

rendaw wrote: post #529
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…

What an awful professor! When I first tried to learn pointers, I didn't get it. I tried again 6 months later and suddenly it clicked. The same thing happened for another guy I was learning with. So the professor just gaslit years of students into thinking they were too dumb to get programming, and also left them with the developmental disability of "if you can't figure something out in a few days, you'll never get it…

Indeed. Never let any idiot like this put you off. Back yourself and persist, persist, persist.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#537

Post by habinero »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #527
habinero wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s still a collaborative and iterative process. That doesn’t mean they don’t work. I don’t need ai to one shot my entire job for it to be crazy useful.

If you find it helpful, that's fine. I like it as spicy autocorrect, and turn it off when I find it annoying.

I actually do look into what people do because as much fun as being a hater is, it's important not to get lost in the sauce.

From what I've seen, it's basically all:

1. People tricking themselves into feeling productive but they're not, actually

2. People tricking themselves into feeling productive but they're actually doing sloppy work

3. Hobby or toy stuff

4. Stuff that isn't critical to get right

5. Stuff they don't know how to judge the quality of

6. ofc the grifters chasing X payouts and driving FOMO

7. People who find it kinda useful in some limited situations (me)

It has its uses for sure, but I don't find it transformative. It can't do the hard parts and for anything useful, I need to check exactly what it did, and if I do that, it's much faster to do myself. Or make a script to do it.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#538

Post by tempodox »

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…

We’ve seen so many instances of Worse Is Better™ materialize around software development (and other areas) that I don’t dare to be as optimistic as you.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#539

Post by philipswood »

hakunin wrote: post #453
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we want to get really narrow I'd say real determinism is possible only in abstract systems, to which you'd reply it's just my ignorance of all possible factors involved and hence the incompleteness of the model. To which I'd point of practical limitations involved with that. And that reason, even though it is incorrect and I don't use it in this way, I understand why some people are using the quantifiers more/less…

I don't think I'm being pedantic or narrow. Cosmic rays, power spikes, and falling cows can change the course of deterministic software. I'm saying that your "compiler" either has intentionally designed randomness (or "creativity") in it, or it doesn't. Not sure why we're acting like these are more or less deterministic. They are either deterministic or not inside normal operation of a computer.

To be clear: I'm not engaging with your main point about whether LLMs are usable in software engineering or not.

I'm specifically addressing your use of the concept of determinism.

An LLM is a set of matrix multiplies and function applications. The only potentially non-deterministic step is selecting the next token from the final output and that can be done deterministically.

By your strict use of the definition they absolutely can be deterministic.

But that is not actually interesting for the point at hand. The real point has to do with reproducibility, understand ability and tolerances.

3blue1brown has a really nice set of videos on showing how the LLM machinery fits together.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#540

Post by tvbusy »

ipsento606 wrote: post #115

> Software engineers are scared of designing things themselves. When I use a framework, it's because I believe that the designers of that framework are i) probably better at software engineering than I am, and ii) have encountered all sorts of problems and scaling issues (both in terms of usage and actual codebase size) that I haven't encountered yet, and have designed the framework to ameliorate those problems. Thos…

Totally. Frameworks also make it a lot easier for new team members to contribute. React, for example, makes it a lot easier to hire. Any project with moderate size will require some kind of convention to keep things consistent and choosing a framework makes this easier.

Now look at the cross team collaboration and it gets even harder without frameworks. When every team has their own conventions, how would they communicate and work together? Imagine a website with React, Vue, Angular all over the place, all fighting for the same DOM.

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