The role of developer skills in agentic coding
martinfowler.com
The role of developer skills in agentic coding
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Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#2> supervised agent
This is the trick. Human in the loop, not human hiding in an ivory tower after uttering a single command. This is ~effectively what I see a lot of shops doing right now:
"Clean up the codebase please. Apply best practices :D. OH. By the way, heres a laundry list of 100 things to NOT do: ".
I get a lot more uplift out of use cases like:
"Please generate a custom Stream implementation that is read-only and sources bytes from an underlying chunked representation. Mock the chunk loading part. Primarily demonstrate the ReadAsync method and transition logic between chunks."
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#3Here is how I use it: As a writing assistant that lives in my IDE, and as a very very cool and sophisticated rubber duck that can answer me.
Something I do quite a lot is throwing back and forth a discussion over a particular piece of code, usually provided with little to no context (because that's my task to worry about), hammering it until we get that functionality correct, then presenting it with broader context to fit it in (or I simply do that part by hand).
Here is how I don't use it: As an agent that gets broad goals that he is supposed to fulfill on its own.
Why? Because the time and effort I have to invest to ensure that the output of an agentic system is in line with what I actually try to accomplish, is simply too much, for all the reasons outlined in this excellent article.
Ironically, this is even more true, since using AI as an incredibly capable writing assistant, already speeds up my workflow considerably. So in a way, less agentic AI empowers me in a way that makes me more critical of the additional time I'd have to invest to play around the quirks of agentic AI.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#4I think of the modern developer being more like a shepherd rather than a builder now. You have to vibe with the machine, but you need to make sure they stay on easy terrain and give them structure instead of letting them simply free graze.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#5I'm surprised to not see an obvious one (for me): Use AI around the periphery.
There's very often a heap of dev tools, introspection, logging, conversion, etc tools that need to be build and maintained. I've had a lot of luck using agents to make and fix these. For example a tool that collates data and logs in a bespoke planning system.
It is a lot of generated boilerplate off the critical path to build these tools and I just don't want to do it most days.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#6> 15k LOC codebase
I wish articles about AI assistance would caveat this at the start. 15k LOC is a weekend hackathon project, which is all well and good, but not reflective of the work that 99% of developers are doing in their day jobs.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#7I find that I have to steer the AI a lot, but I do have optimism that better prompting will lead to better agents.
To take an example from the article: code re-use. When I'm writing code, I subconsciously have a mental inventory of what code is already there, and I'm subconsciously asking myself "hey, is this new task super similar to something that we already have working (and tested!) code for?". I haven't looked into the details of the initial prompt that a coding agent gets, but my intuition is that an addition to the prompt instructing the agent to keep an inventory of what's in the codebase, and when planning out a new batch of code, check the requirements of the new tasks against what's already there.
Yes, this adds a bunch of compute cycles to the planning process, but we should be honest and say "that's just the price of an agent writing code". Better planning > ability to fix things.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#8> 15k LOC codebase I wish articles about AI assistance would caveat this at the start. 15k LOC is a weekend hackathon project, which is all well and good, but not reflective of the work that 99% of developers are doing in their day jobs.
I, too, habitually write 7500 lines of code per day.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#9> 15k LOC codebase I wish articles about AI assistance would caveat this at the start. 15k LOC is a weekend hackathon project, which is all well and good, but not reflective of the work that 99% of developers are doing in their day jobs.
I, too, habitually write 7500 lines of code per day.
For a brand new project that you're trying to get done in a weekend--aka a weekend hackathon project--it's very doable. Would not recommend committing 7500 lines of code per day at your day job though.
Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I, too, habitually write 7500 lines of code per day.
For a brand new project that you're trying to get done in a weekend--aka a weekend hackathon project--it's very doable. Would not recommend committing 7500 lines of code per day at your day job though.
If you work 8 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday and each line has on average 40 characters, then on average you have to type about 5 characters a second to hit 7000 lines of code.
There's some heavy assumptions about boilerplate or autogenerated code going on in that estimate, as I don't think very many average 5 characters a second over 16 hours.