Comment by groundzeros2015
6 days ago
Why are you using experience and authoritative framing about a technology we’ve been using for less than 6 months?
6 days ago
Why are you using experience and authoritative framing about a technology we’ve been using for less than 6 months?
The person they are responding with dictated an authoritative framing that isn’t true.
I know people have emotional responses to this, but if you think people aren’t effectively using agents to ship code in lots of domains, including existing legacy code bases, you are incorrect.
Do we know exactly how to do that well, of course not, we still fruitlessly argue about how humans should write software. But there is a growing body of techniques on how to do agent first development, and a lot of those techniques are naturally converging because they work.
I think programming effectiveness is inherently tied to the useful life of software, and we will need to see that play out.
This is not to suggest that AI tools do not have value but that “I just have agents writing code and it works great!” Has yet to hit its test.
The views I see often shared here are typical of those in the trenches of the tech industry: conservative.
I get it; I do. It's rapidly challenging the paradigm that we've setup over the years in a way that it's incredibly jarring, but this is going to be our new reality or you're going to be left behind in MOST industries; highly regulated industries are a different beast.
So; instead of just out-of-hand dismissing this, figure out the best ways to integrate agents into your and your teams'/companies' workstreams. It will accelerate the work and change your role from what it is today to something different; something that takes time and experience to work with.
7 replies →
Also people need to be more specific about technologies/tasks they do. Otherwise it's apples to oranges.
6 months?
I've been using LLMs to augment development since early December 2023. I've expanded the scope and complexity of the changes made since then as the models grew. Before beads existed, I used a folder of markdown files for externalized memory.
Just because you were late to the party doesn't mean all of us were.
> Just because you were late to the party doesn't mean all of us were.
It wasn't a party I liked back in 2023. I'm just repeating the same stuff I see said over and over again here, but there has been a step change with Opus 4.5.
You can still it in action now because the other models are still where Opus was at a while ago. I recently needed to make small change to script I was using. It is a tiny (50 line) script written with the help of AI's ages ago, but was subtly wrong in so many ways. It's now become clear neither the AI's (I used several and cross checked) nor myself had a clue about what we were dealing with. The current "seems to work" version was created after much blood caused by misunderstandings was spilt, exposing bugs that had to be fixed.
I asked Claude 4.6 to fix yet another misunderstanding, and the result was a patch changing the minimum number of lines to get the job done. Just reviewing such a surgical modification was far easier than doing it myself.
I gave exactly the same prompt to Gemini. The result was a wholesale rearrangement of the code. Maybe it was good, but the effort to verify that was far lager than just doing it myself. It was a very 2023 experience.
The usual 2023 experience for me was ask an AI write some greenfield code, and get a result that looked like someone had changed variable names in something they found on the web after a brief search for code that looked like it might do a similar job. If you got lucky, it might have found something that was indeed very similar, but in my case that was rare. Asking it to modify code unlike something it had seen before was like asking someone to poke your eyes with a stick.
As I said, some of the organisers of this style of party seem have gotten their act together, so now it is well worth joining their parties. But this is a newish development.
If you hired a person six months ago and in that time they'd produced a ton of useful code for your product, wouldn't you say with authoritative framing that their hiring was a good decision?
It would, but I haven’t seen that. What I’ve seen is a lot of people setting up cool agent workflows which feel very productive, but aren’t producing coherent work.
This may be a result of me using tools poorly, or more likely evaluating merits which matter less than I think. But I don’t think we can see that yet as people just invented these agent workflows and we haven’t seen it yet.
Note that the situation was not that different before LLMs. I’ve seen PMs with all the tickets setup, engineers making PRs with reviews, etc and not making progress on the product. The process can be emulated without substantive work.
Why is it always "tons of code"? Unless you are paid by the line of code writin "tons of code" makes no sense.