Comment by logicprog
20 days ago
This feels very odd to me, because I'm actually able to refactor and DRY and generally improve my code and tests and documentation much more with agents to help speed up the process than I ever would have before.
I also make sure to describe and break down problems when I ask an agent to implement them in such a way that they produce code that I think is elegant.
It seems to me like people think there's only two settings: either slaving away carefully on the craft of your code at a syntactic level, manually writing it, or shitting out first pass vide-coded slop without taking care to specify the problem or iterate on the code afterwards. But you can apply just as much care to what the agent produces, and in my experience, still see significant speedups, since refactoring and documentation and pulling out common abstractions and so on are something that agents can do extremely reliably and quickly, but otherwise require a lot of manual text editing and compile/test passes to do yourself.
As long as you don't get hung up on making the agent produce exactly character for character, the code you would have produced, but instead just have good standards for functionality and cleanliness and elegance of design.
> Either sleeping away carefully on the craft of your code manually writing it, or shitting out first pass vide-coded stuff without really taking care to specify the problem or iterate on the code afterwards.
I think the thing you are missing is that people are
> shitting out first pass vide-coded stuff without really taking care to specify the problem or iterate on the code afterwards
to assume that people will take a path other than the path of least resistance now when they never did before, such as copy-pasting directly from stackoverflow without understanding the implications of the code.
But that's kind of my point — there's still a choice whether to care about the quality of your code and spend time refining it or not with agentic coding as with any other technology; people who took the time to write good code before can absolutely continue to do that, and people who didn't care about good code before will not care about good code now either. It was a choice that was not the path of least resistance before, and it is still a choice that is not the path of least resistance now.
Now, there is the very valid point that those that don't care about code quality can now churn it out at vastly accelerated rates, but that didn't really feel like what the original article was talking about. It felt like it was specifically trying to make the claim that a Gentic tools don't really afford the ability to refine or improve your code or strongly discourage it, such that you kind of can't care about good code anymore. And it's that that I wanted to push back on.
There has always been a tension between "take the time to build something you know will work" and "prioritize speed over all else and hope you get lucky and it doesn't fall over too fast" in software. AI is making the difference in speed between the two schools of thought larger and larger, and it's almost certain to make the latter philosophy more financially attractive.
Yeah, I can see that. But that didn't really feel like what the original article was arguing. It felt more that it was arguing that even people who care about good code, if they use agentic tools at all, can't produce good code, and it was the advantage in the velocity of agentic tools as a whole over the production of good code as a strictly separate category that was the problem?