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Is it all just vapourware?

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Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#71

Post by satvikpendem »

firasd wrote: post #14

I wonder if there is cargo culting afoot There are definitely guys in some companies just pointing an agent swarm at 50 Github tickets and saying "go get 'em boys" and hence need a lot of orchestration tools but for the rest of us do we really need the AI to do all the build steps and the testing steps... or do we just need the new feature that runs when the button is clicked and then we can check it out in the brows…

The build and test steps allow the agent to self correct. Why would I want to waste my time trying out a half-finished or outright broken feature if the AI didn't even run a type checker on it to see if it even compiled?

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#72

Post by mark242 »

20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

> Why do only the poor quality LLM code generation users make PRs to open source projects, and never the engineers that know how to really use it correctly?

It could be that the engineers who are extremely productive with LLMs are landing PRs that look indistinguishable from good, hand-written PRs.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#73

Post by msdz »

makk wrote: post #29
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just pointing an agent swarm at 50 Github tickets and saying "go get 'em boys" I still don‘t know if this is real. If it works like that, where are the companies that only kept every tenth, 10x‘d AI enhanced dev? They should have significantly higher margins. The companies that keep all devs and 10x‘d them, finally bringing that backlog to 0 should have exploding revenue and profit. Where does AI create value? I ca…

The creation of downstream issues has gotten faster, in my experience. The rate at which shit is thrown against walls has also gotten faster.

Exactly. If you can free engineering capacity from tedious busywork (fixing bugs), you have them available for implementing/delegating to implement experimental features into new revenue streams.

Why fire anyone in this scenario? Growth is only going to keep coming.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#74

Post by vatsachak »

20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

Nah this take is wrong. I used Claude code with my custom skill and I wrote a more performant scheduler than the default Linux one in Rust.

It's not just productivity, it's life changing.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#75

Post by 20k »

kvark wrote: post #61
20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

Or maybe open-source development is just poorly compatible with AI workflow? Today, projects may need a community, an issue tracker, but pull requests are becoming less important. I suspect the ban of AI in established projects to be a very complex decision. Even if core developers would like to use AI, they don't want to review all of the AI-generated code from the larger community. So the only consistent way to pre…

Why would the PR format be bad for LLMs? Its just code review + merging in branches, which is what every company should be doing anyway

Nothing's stopping core developers from adopting LLM generated code for themselves, while banning it for external contributors

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#76

Post by stock_toaster »

badlibrarian wrote: post #53
skrebbel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a "very very senior dev" wouldn't tell me that I'm doing it wrong without telling me what I'm doing wrong.

I've tried. It's like trying to teach squirrels how to Google. Really, you just have to figure out what works for you. You will be rewarded.

This combination of "no true scotsman" and "you're holding it wrong" is quite amazing to behold.

If AI is as good as it being marketed as, you shouldn't even be able to hold it wrong!

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#77

Post by eddythompson80 »

skrebbel wrote: post #36
badlibrarian wrote: post #17

It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.

I did but it was followed by "holy shit now I gotta review this +3000 -500 LOC PR full of subtly wrong abstractions, needless diversions and incorrect assumptions". People keep repeating your sentiment here but I simply can't follow, are we even on the same planet? Or did everyone switch to just not caring about maintainability and code quality anymore? Or are your work tasks simply so mindnumbingly, stupidly simple…

You have to have a team of agents with different roles reviewing that for you. An Advocate, a Skeptic, an Architect, a Security Engineer, a Disgruntled User, a Single Mom, a Clueless CTO, etc. each provides their unique prospective on the change. Then you have a Remediator and a Consolidator to address the feedback. Finally a Liquidator in case of a catastrophic failure.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#78

Post by jamestimmins »

Its reasonable to dislike a bad product experience, but its strange to draw a conclusion of AI altogether based on a tool with limited usage (I've never heard of it).

That's like saying smart watches are useless based on trying out the smart watch made by will.i.am's tech company rather than Apple's.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#79

Post by satvikpendem »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #11

"The hard part of software engineering was never writing the code." Again, are we still on this ridiculous concept. I stopped reading at that sentence. Is that going to be the revisionist future that the industry tells itself - ""one day, LLMs came along and suddenly computers could program themselves, and it was an absolute revolution, but it made no difference at all to anything because "The hard part of software e…

A great article yesterday about this very concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49222189

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#80

Post by vatsachak »

mark242 wrote: post #72
20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

> Why do only the poor quality LLM code generation users make PRs to open source projects, and never the engineers that know how to really use it correctly? It could be that the engineers who are extremely productive with LLMs are landing PRs that look indistinguishable from good, hand-written PRs.

LLM code is obvious to spot. If an LLM designed a screwdriver set it would make a screwdriver for each head instead of making a replaceable head.

LLMs are superhuman at short term coding such as debugging and writing tests though and you're missing out by not using them there.

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