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Agentic Coding Is a Trap

larsfaye.com

91–100 of 403 posts

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#91

> only a skilled developer who's thinking critically, and comfortable operating at the architectural level, can spot issues in the thousands of lines of generated code, before they become a problem. An additional factor: to find issues in generated code, the developer has to care . Many developers (especially at big firms) are already profoundly checked out from their work and are just looking for a way to close thei…

There are exceptions to this, but in big firms many developers on many teams are actually punished for caring.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#92
post #79

As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". I really don't like these meetings where you're dragged in in the middle of them without any clue. The questions came flying in fast, without any introduction, and this was about an external integration out of a dozen. They have their own lingo, different from ours, to make the situation worse. I had a _very…

What kind of place do you work where you get dragged into a meeting halfway through and then are peppered with technical questions without context, that you're expected to answer on the spot? Please let us know because I'm sure a lot of us want to avoid such a place. "I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.

Not OP, but similar context (~20yr exp.). You absolutely can get away with "I'll need to dig more into this to give you a good answer" but you are _for sure_ expected to have at least some answer ready-to-go. Especially if it's under your purview.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#93
post #79

As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". I really don't like these meetings where you're dragged in in the middle of them without any clue. The questions came flying in fast, without any introduction, and this was about an external integration out of a dozen. They have their own lingo, different from ours, to make the situation worse. I had a _very…

What kind of place do you work where you get dragged into a meeting halfway through and then are peppered with technical questions without context, that you're expected to answer on the spot? Please let us know because I'm sure a lot of us want to avoid such a place. "I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.

From the way it's written, looks like it's his code that he wrote recently.

It's quite common to search for the author of a piece of code to ask questions about that code.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that’s been my line every time someone makes impressed noises when I say I’m a programmer - it’s really not that hard, it’s really just a question of whether you like it enough to put the work in, like anything else. “Don’t you have to be a math wiz?” No dude 95% of the time whatever you’re trying to do already has a very well researched approach, a lot of times you’re just picking which pre-vetted solution to…

no i mean the opposite, some programming is actually hard

Right. Like anywhere the conceptual problems haven't been all figured out yet, or where higher order effects happen with scale or particular shapes of data/substrate and you don't know them in advance.

Sometimes hard like interesting and you get to do really novel thinking. A load of p2p/decentralised things are hard like this.

Also sometimes hard like you get to a particular challenge and it turns out to be a notoriously unsolved mathematical thing, or you push against subtle boundaries of core libraries, runtimes, systems etc. Working with metagenome assemblies is this kind of hard.

Honestly the hard code I've done made such a difference to my brain. There's plenty of trivial stuff I'm happy to have automated, but of I can't work on the hard problems I may as well not be involved at all.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#95
post #79

As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". I really don't like these meetings where you're dragged in in the middle of them without any clue. The questions came flying in fast, without any introduction, and this was about an external integration out of a dozen. They have their own lingo, different from ours, to make the situation worse. I had a _very…

What kind of place do you work where you get dragged into a meeting halfway through and then are peppered with technical questions without context, that you're expected to answer on the spot? Please let us know because I'm sure a lot of us want to avoid such a place. "I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.

This can happen more or less anywhere if you spend enough time at a company. At some point you'll get pulled into a meeting like this because others think you're in expert in a codebase/area you're not.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#96

>and then pulls the slot machine lever over and over Does anyone really do this? You want verification and self-correction in a loop, not rerolling and cherrypicking. The non-determinism point is really tiresome to hear over and over.

The slot machine metaphor gets thrown around a lot but it hasn’t really described my experience with LLMs since ~2024

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#97
post #79

As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". I really don't like these meetings where you're dragged in in the middle of them without any clue. The questions came flying in fast, without any introduction, and this was about an external integration out of a dozen. They have their own lingo, different from ours, to make the situation worse. I had a _very…

What kind of place do you work where you get dragged into a meeting halfway through and then are peppered with technical questions without context, that you're expected to answer on the spot? Please let us know because I'm sure a lot of us want to avoid such a place. "I'll need to study the docs and code to answer these questions properly" is a perfectly fine (and very diplomatic) response to treatment like that.

Startup life man. Happy to help, just rough sometimes.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#98

it's a fairly new way of doing things. I predict, in the future it will be more formalized and standardized like AGILE and SCRUM and all that boring stuff. The result of that though would be establishment of development patterns that are good practices. The rule of thumb is: An agent can write it, but a human has to understand it before it gets pushed to prod. I'm still not convinced about the doom and gloom over dev…

  > standardized like AGILE and SCRUM
perhaps too cynical, but if its anything like agile and scrum in $CORPORATION it will just add to the daily slog and gum up everything...

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#99
I've been having the same feeling too. At work, I try to do a hybrid prompt where I fill in things at method level with some placeholder pseudocode and let the prompt fill in the blanks. This helps with remembering and keeping a memory map. But its a lost cause keeping up with other's PRs that are often very verbose and high volume. For a lot of backend programming without a very complex domain, I think this works fine.

But I still want to be in touch with coding by hand and have ventured into systems programming, outside of work, which I feel AI is less useful for currently.

Re: Agentic Coding Is a Trap

#100
Using AI to go faster is optimizing the wrong thing. At every place I've worked, the "code writing" part takes the least amount of time, compared to all the other things you need to do in order to implement a feature. Let's examine a feature that takes a day to code:

First, you've got to plan everything, using whatever Agile or Waterfall planning ritual your company uses, get the task breakdown, file the JIRA tickets, decide who's doing the work. That all can take days or even weeks. Then you need to write a design doc with your proposed design, and get that reviewed by your peers/teammates. Again, another week for any substantial feature. If there are multiple teams involved, you need to get buy-in and design agreement among those multiple teams, let's add another week. At some places, you need approval to commence work, which can take multiple days, depending on the approver's schedule and availability.

Then, you take a day and write the code and make sure it passes tests.

Then, it's code review time, and this can involve a lot of back and forth with your team, resulting in multiple iterations and additional code reviews. Another "days or weeks" stretch. At bigger companies, you're going to need to pass all sorts of reviews from other departments, like legal, privacy, performance, accessibility, QA... even if done in parallel, let's add a conservative 2 weeks. Finally, you push to staging, and need to get some soak time internally among dogfooders, so you have some confidence that it's working. +1 week. Then you're ready to push from staging to prod, but since you work at a serious company, nothing goes to 100% prod right away--you need to slowly ramp up and check feedback/metrics in case you need to roll back. The ramp to fully launched could take another two weeks.

So here's a feature that took, what, maybe two months from design to release, and we're falling all over ourselves to optimize the part that took a day so that it takes 5 minutes instead...

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