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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
541–550 of 1001 posts
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#542I tried the agent thing on: - Large C codebase (new feature and bugfix) - Small rust codebase (new feature) - Brand new greenfield frontend for an in-spec and documented openAPI API - Small fixes to an existing frontend It failed _dramatically_ in all cases. Maybe I'm using this thing wrong but it is devin-level fail. Gets diffs wrong. Passes phantom arguments to tools. Screws up basic features. Pulls in hundreds of…
Same here. I keep trying to figure out WTF agent that people are using to get these great results, because Copilot with Claude 4 and Gemini 2.5 has been a disastrous mess for me.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#543This reads even more like an angry teenager than my angsty high school diary. I'm not sure how many more strawmans and dismissive remarks I can handle in one article.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#544And this goes at least part of the way towards explaining why Fly.io has been the second least reliable cloud provider I've ever used, after Azure.
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#545I love LLMs, and I really like programming with Cursor, but I never managed to get the "agents with tons of stuff in their context" mode to work for me. I use Cursor like a glorified code completer, 4-5 lines at a time, because otherwise the LLM just makes too many mistakes that compound. If you let it run in the "write my code for me" mode, and ask it to fix some mistake it made, it will always add more code, never…
I would love to know as well. I also have problems with the LLM coding agents when it comes to lesser-known languages like Julia. Has anybody solved this yet?
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#546I like LLMs, it's legitimately impressive to see people vibe code solutions (some times even to novel ideas). Agents are a much better use of LLMs than auto complete (which is terrible).
However I've tried coding agents, and well they suck... for me. Nearly all of the code I write these days is performance sensitive, as well as design sensitive (making abstractions for others to use), and not close to what could be considered boilerplate. The boilerplate I do write usually takes a trivial amount of time to write by hand. I'll keep trying whatever is new in AI every few months, I certainly don't want to be left behind, but so far that strategy hasn't left me optimistic.
> but the code is shitty, like that of a junior developer
It's worse than a junior. Juniors learn and grow, if they're a good junior it's often fairly rapid and self directed. Juniors can also ask for guidance or help, this is something maybe agents will be capable of in the future, but I could see it going pretty poorly for reasons tied to the first point about not learning. While LLMs contain a ton of information, more than a junior could, the junior is a better reasoning machine; I don't consider LLM "reasoning" to be anything close to the meatbag version.
> but the craft
Craft matters, it's important to enjoy and take pride in your work. If you enjoy managing AI agents that's fine, lots of programmers end up on the manager career path, but it's not for everyone.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#547The reaction to this article is interesting. I have found AI to be useful in software contexts that most people never exercise or expect based on their intuitions of what an LLM can do.
For me, a highly productive but boring use of LLMs for code is that they excel at providing midwit “best practice” solutions to common problems. They are better documentation than the documentation and can do a lot of leg work e.g. Linux syscall implementation details. My application domains tend to require more sophisticated solutions than an LLM can provide but they still save a lot of rote effort. A lot of software development exists almost entirely in the midwit zone.
Much more interesting, they are decent at reducing concepts in literature to code practice for which there are no code examples. Google and StackOverflow turn up nothing. For example, I’ve found them useful for generating specialized implementations of non-Euclidean computational geometry algorithms that don’t really exist in the wild that I’ve ever seen. This is a big win, it literally turns months of effort into hours of effort.
On the other hand, I do a lot of work with algorithms that don’t exist in literature, never mind public code, with extremely performance-engineered implementations. There is an important take away from this too: LLMs are hilariously bad at helping with this but so are human software developers if required to do the same thing with no context.
Knowledge for which there is little or no training data is currently a formidable moat, both for LLMs and humans.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#548I love LLMs, and I really like programming with Cursor, but I never managed to get the "agents with tons of stuff in their context" mode to work for me. I use Cursor like a glorified code completer, 4-5 lines at a time, because otherwise the LLM just makes too many mistakes that compound. If you let it run in the "write my code for me" mode, and ask it to fix some mistake it made, it will always add more code, never…
imo cursor's small context window on the $20 plan is what kills their agent mode. Try claude code or anything that lets you use larger context windows (I think cursor has a tier you can pay for now?). claude code regularly deletes and corrects code and LLMs are very much capable of that today.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#549I love LLMs, and I really like programming with Cursor, but I never managed to get the "agents with tons of stuff in their context" mode to work for me. I use Cursor like a glorified code completer, 4-5 lines at a time, because otherwise the LLM just makes too many mistakes that compound. If you let it run in the "write my code for me" mode, and ask it to fix some mistake it made, it will always add more code, never…
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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#550Seeing everything these days being about vibe coding, I feel a little old with my VIM setup and my LSP servers who I already thought were a nice productivity increase. The problems I have with the stuff relating to MCP is that the tech around it is developing so fast that it's hard for outsiders to catch up with what the best working setup is, for example. What would you do, for example, if you want to selfhost this?…
Why do you want to selfhost it? I just use https://github.com/Exafunction/windsurf.vim in NeoVim like a super-autocomplete.