Comment by 59nadir
4 days ago
> The best agents can, more or less, crank out working code after a few iterations, but it's brittle, and riddled with bad decisions.
You're right, I'm very likely overestimating the output even though I'm on the skeptical end of it.
> The places where the AI really shines are in boilerplate situations -- it's great for writing an initial test suite
I definitely do agree with this; and I would add that at that point you can really make do with tab-completion and not a full agent workflow. I used this successfully even back in 2021-2022 with Copilot.
> In my more cynical moments, I start to wonder if the people who are most eager to push these things are 0-3 years out of coding bootcamps
I think it's all in all a mix of a lot of factors: I think spending your time mostly on well-trodden ground will definitely give you a sense of GenAI being more useful than if you aren't, and I think most newer programmers spend most of their time on exactly that. They may also be given tasks even at work that are more boilerplatey in nature; they're definitely not making deep design decisions as a rule, or having anything to do with holistic architectural decisions.
> I definitely do agree with this; and I would add that at that point you can really make do with tab-completion and not a full agent workflow. I used this successfully even back in 2021-2022 with Copilot.
Sure. The thing that "agents" add to this -- and I think it's actually really valuable -- is the ability to run their own output and fix the bugs.
Yesterday I pointed an agent at a controller, asked it to write a test suite (with some core requirements of what exactly to test), and then I reviewed the content of the tests for sanity. Then I pointed another agent at the output of that code, and told it to run the tests and fix the bugs.
It got stuck once or twice, requiring me to say "don't do that" and/or change a few lines of code, but overall I had a much more comprehensive test suite than I ever would have written, in about 15 minutes of drinking coffee.