Comment by swatcoder
2 days ago
> 3. If a problem can be framed in a way that a coding agent can solve...
This reminds me of the South Park underwear gnomes. You picked a tool and set an expectation, then just kind of hand wave over the hard part in the middle, as though framing problems "in a way coding agents can solve" is itself a well-understood or bounded problem.
Does it sometimes take 50x effort to understand a problem and the agent well enough to get that done? Are there classes of problems where it can't be done? Are either of those concerns something you can recognize before they impact you? At commercial quality, is it an accessible skill for inexperienced people or do you need a mastery of coding, the problem domain, or the coding agent to be able to rely on it? Can teams recruit people who can reliable achieve any of this? How expensive is that talent? etc
>as though framing problems "in a way coding agents can solve" is itself a well-understood or bounded problem.
It's not, but if you can A) make it cheap to try out different types of framings - not all of them have to work and B) automate everything else then the labor intensity of programming decreases drastically.
>At commercial quality, is it an accessible skill for inexperienced people
I'd expect the opposite, it would be an extremely inaccessible skill requiring high skill and high pay. But, if 2 people can deliver as much as 15 people at a higher quality and they're paid triple, it's still way cheaper overall.
I would still expect somebody following this development pattern to routinely discover a problem the LLM can't deal with and have to dive under the hood to fix it - digging down below multiple levels of abstraction. This would be Hard with a capital H.
We've had failed projects since long before LLMs. I think there is a tendency for people to gloss over this (3.) regardless, but working with an LLM it tends to become obvious much more quickly, without investing tens/hundreds of person-hours. I know it's not perfect, but I find a lot of the things people complain about would've been a problem either way - especially when people think they are going to go from 'hello world' to SaaS-billionaire in an hour.
I think mastery of the problem domain is still important, and until we have effectively infinite context windows (that work perfectly), you will need to understand how and when to refactor to maximize quality and relevance of data in context.
well according to xianshou's profile they work in finance so it makes sense to me that they would gloss over the hard part of programming when describing how AI is going to improve it
Working in one domain does not preclude knowledge of others. I work in cybersec but spent my first working decade in construction estimation for institutional builds. I can talk confidently about firewalls or the hospital you want to build.
No need to make assumptions based on a one-line hacker news profile.
> as though framing problems "in a way coding agents can solve" is itself a well-understood or bounded problem
It is imminently solvable! All that is necessary is to use a subset of language easier for the machine to understand and use in a very defined way; we could call this "coding language" or something similar. Even build tools to ensure we write this correctly (to avoid confusing the machine). Perhaps we could define our own algorithms using this "language" to help them along!