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The role of developer skills in agentic coding

martinfowler.com

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Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#81

Post by cheevly »

svilen_dobrev wrote: post #44

i have mentored a few people to become Programmers. Some for months, some for years. It's like teaching someone to ride a bycicle. Hand-holding first, then hand-guiding, then short flights, then longer... Different people pick stuff at different pace and shape.. but they do learn.. if they want to. What i completely miss in these LLM parrots-agents-generators, is the learning. You can't teach them anything. They woul…

Literally all of this is easy to solve if you actually tried. Developers are literally too lazy to write their own AI tooling, it’s bizarre to me.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#82

Post by Hasu »

bigs wrote: post #63
ikerino wrote: post #12

I use Cursor for most of my development these days. This article aligns pretty closely with my experiences. A few additional observations: 1. Anecdotally, AI agents feel stuck somewhere circa ~2021. If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago. This is incredibly frustrating to watch and correct for. Providing explicit instructions for which pac…

The tortoise and the hare is an important point to raise - this is exactly how I feel. But how long before AI is Good Enough that the point is irrelevant?

Checks my notes from 3 years ago, 2.5 years ago, 2 years ago, 1.5 years ago, 1 year ago, and 6 months ago when we had this exact same discussion

It says here that it'll only be another 6 months!

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#84

Post by jb_briant »

jgilias wrote: post #80
jb_briant wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you give your process feedback, here is my emotions related one. When I dev with LLM, I don't face my own limits in term of reasoning and architecturing, but I face the limit of the model to interpret prompts. Instead of trying to be a better engineer, I'm frustratingly prompting an unintelligent human-like interface. I'm not fuding LLM, I use it everyday, all the time. But it won't make me a better engineer. A…

I feel like this is the big question now. How to find the correct balance that lets you preserve and improve your skills. I haven’t yet found the answer, but I feel like it should be in being very deliberate about what you let the agent do, and what kind of work you do in the “artisanal” way, so not even AI-enabled auto-complete. But in order to be able to find the right balance, one does need to learn fully what the…

Agreed. Auto-complete on steroid isn't what I call using LLM for coding. It's just a convenience.

What I do is to write pure functions with LLM. Once I designed the software and I have the API, I can tell the model to write a function which does a specific job where I know the inputs and outputs but I'm lazy to write the code itself.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#85

Post by rvz »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #36

I've been playing around with vibe coding and I think a lot of the issues brought up could be fixed by an architecture abstraction layer that does not exist today. My idea would be something like an architecture-graph (Archigraph working title) that would recursively describe how an application works or should work. Then when an agentic coder is doing a task they can easily see the bigger picture of how an applicatio…

"Vibe Coding" is not Software Engineering.

It is "Slopware Engineering".

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#87

Post by thom »

_1tem wrote: post #48

Developer skill is obviously still essential — you can’t steer if you couldn’t drive. But what about developer energy? Before AI I could only code about 2 hours per day (actual time spent writing code) but with Claude Code I can easily code for 5 hours straight without breaking a sweat. It feels like riding an e-bike instead of a bicycle. AI genuinely feels like Steve Jobs analogy of a bicycle for the mind — it doesn…

Yeah this feels right. It helps with the bits I care about and definitely reduces friction there, but it also breaks through every wall when I’m off the happy path. I had to solve three layers of AWS bullshit yesterday to get back to training a model and if I’d had to solve them myself or bring in someone from my platform team I’d have ended up stopping short. I don’t really want to replace the parts of my job that I enjoy with AI, but I love having something to pick up the miserable bits when I’m stuck, confused, frustrated or bored. You’re absolutely right that this helps conserve energy.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#88

Post by moqizhengz »

kristopolous wrote: post #68
ikerino wrote: post #12

I use Cursor for most of my development these days. This article aligns pretty closely with my experiences. A few additional observations: 1. Anecdotally, AI agents feel stuck somewhere circa ~2021. If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago. This is incredibly frustrating to watch and correct for. Providing explicit instructions for which pac…

#1 has an easy fix. Clone the dependency you want to use in the directory of your code. Instruct it to go into the directory and look at that code in order to complete task X: "I've got a new directory xyz, in it contains a library to do feature abc. I'll need to include it here to do A to function B and so on" The weird version mixing bug will disappear. If it's closed source, then just do the documentation. You nee…

This is a very typical reply when we see someone pointing out the flaws of AI coding tools. "You are using it wrong, AI can do everything if you properly prompt it"

Yes, it can write everything if I provide enough context, but it ain't 'Intelligence' if context ~= output.

The point here is providing enough context itself is challenging and requires expertise, this makes AI ides unusable for many scenarios.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#89

Post by andai »

kristopolous wrote: post #68
ikerino wrote: post #12

I use Cursor for most of my development these days. This article aligns pretty closely with my experiences. A few additional observations: 1. Anecdotally, AI agents feel stuck somewhere circa ~2021. If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago. This is incredibly frustrating to watch and correct for. Providing explicit instructions for which pac…

#1 has an easy fix. Clone the dependency you want to use in the directory of your code. Instruct it to go into the directory and look at that code in order to complete task X: "I've got a new directory xyz, in it contains a library to do feature abc. I'll need to include it here to do A to function B and so on" The weird version mixing bug will disappear. If it's closed source, then just do the documentation. You nee…

We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.
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