Comment by codr7
7 days ago
I still haven't seen any evidence to match these repeated claims of increased efficiency. What I have seen is reports that makes a lot of sense to me claiming it's all in the user's head.
7 days ago
I still haven't seen any evidence to match these repeated claims of increased efficiency. What I have seen is reports that makes a lot of sense to me claiming it's all in the user's head.
Maybe it's in my head, but I have completed coding projects that I believe would have taken a team of five offshore maybe 12 weeks to do in the past in about ten working days while juggling calls and living normal corporate life.
The win is that I don't have to share the vision of what needs to be done and how it should all work, and then constantly monitor and reframe that in the face of the teams missteps and real findings. I work with the agents directly, and provided I set the architecture and build up systematically I can get really good results. The cycle time between me identifying an issue and the issue getting fixed by me and the agents is now minutes rather than hours or days with an off shore team. Even better the agents can provide bug fixing expertise much quicker than stack overflow - so I can figure out what's wrong much faster so as to specific what needs fixing.
It is no good walking in and requesting functionality, you need to know how the thing you want should work, and you need to know what good looks like, and what bad looks like, and how good is separated from bad. Then the normal process of discovery ("eep that doesn't actually work like I thought") can take place and you can refactor and repair as required.
Sometimes I start something that just doesn't work, you have to recognise that you and the agents are lost, and everything needs to be torn down. You then need to think properly about whats gone wrong and why, and then come back with a better idea. Again - just like with dev teams, but much more clearly and much faster.
I'm working in corporate and haven't seen it yet. The main thing I see is blogs and whatnot of people building new weekend projects with LLMs, that is, greenfield, non-critical software - the type of software that, if I were to write it, I wouldn't bother with CI, tests, that kind of thing with. Sloppy projects, if you will.
But happy to be corrected - is someone using these agents in their paid / professional / enterprise / team job?
I think most of the code in our enterprise is now written by AI. It’s all boring callcenter crud apps, so nobody is really sad they’re not writing any of that code any more. I’m not sure it makes me faster, but I think QA testing what the AI made and occassionaly adjusting it is more fun anyway.
The code is absolutely lower quality, but there were always so many people producing garbage faster than I could produce something nice that the code was always terrible anyway.
There’s an element of wanting to know how the thing works so at least I’ll know when it’s ready to replace me though.
>But happy to be corrected - is someone using these agents in their paid / professional / enterprise / team job?
Yes, and I find them quite useful
I don't see myself going back to the "Google + StackOverflow" approach I had used for 10 years prior (well, I can always fall back to it if necessary, but so far I haven't needed to)
My experience matches OP: my years of experience in manual coding complements the agent approach remarkably well
I’ve asked this many times on here - I never get a coherent answer
I am, but in a very narrow focus: mostly examining our existing codebase as a more powerful but fuzzier search, and a system to then generate a plan to implement and approach which I tweak.
I sometimes use it to scaffold out some boilerplate for tests, but never tests themselves: no matter what I try it always ends up writing the useless straight-jacket "change alert" style tests that break on any change to the unit under test, which I despise.
There was an article on here not too long ago - I can’t find it now - where the authors discussed how they leaned full in on it and were submitting 20k+ line PRs to open source projects in languages they were not very familiar with.
However, they mentioned you had to let go of reviewing every line of every PR. I read that and was fine with holding off on full vibe coding for now. Nobody intelligent would pay for that and no competent developer would operate like that.
I have a couple coworkers big on it. The lesser skilled ones are miserable to work with. I’ve kept my same code review process but number of comments left has at least 5x’d (not just from me, either). And I’m not catching everything - I get fatigued and call it done. Duplicated logic, missed edge cases, arbitrary patterns and conventions, etc. The high skilled ones less so, but I still don’t look forward to reviewing their PRs anymore. Too much work on my end.
There are many devs who are more focused on results than being correct. These are the ones I’ve seen most drawn to LLMs/agents. There’s a place for these devs, but having worked on an aging startups codebase, I hope there aren’t too many.