Comment by hatefulheart
1 month ago
I don't believe this. Either you're lying, or you just haven't caught on how to use a computer.
Everything I do to interact with my computer is still the same.
See how boring you are?
1 month ago
I don't believe this. Either you're lying, or you just haven't caught on how to use a computer.
Everything I do to interact with my computer is still the same.
See how boring you are?
Ok sorry about that. I seriously don't believe him. The Agent is so fast there's literally no way you can be faster.
Telling the agent your high level plan that you are extremely familiar with and then having the agent execute on 2000 lines of code is FASTER then having you execute on that 2000 lines of code. There is no reality where that can be physically beaten by even someone who's typing really quickly with zero pause. Physically impossible.
Less boring or not? Another way to put it... although my answer is boring, I think I'm right. He is either a liar or like many other people lacks skill in using AI... because the transition to AI is happening so fast... not many people are fully utilizing AI to it's maximum potential. Many still use IDEs, many still interact with terminal. Many people still don't use it to configure infrastructure, do database administration, deploy code... etc.
Why are you starting the clock at the time when you already have a "high level plan that you are extremely familiar with"? I think it's fairer to start from "I received a bug report/feature request" or similar.
Also, haven't you ever had a situation where the prompt you started with ends up being longer than the final code diff? Perhaps a subtle bug that's hard to describe/trigger, but ended up having a simple root cause like an off-by-one error?
Also also, coding agents are infamous for generating way more code than is strictly necessary. The 2000 lines of code that the agent generated may well have been only 200 lines had you written it yourself.
>Why are you starting the clock at the time when you already have a "high level plan that you are extremely familiar with"? I think it's fairer to start from "I received a bug report/feature request" or similar.
Done both. We tag the LLM on slack in a reply and the ticket gets created and forwarded to an agent that automatically works on it. The only time a human is in the loop is review or or queries for changes.
>Also, haven't you ever had a situation where the prompt you started with ends up being longer than the final code diff? Perhaps a subtle bug that's hard to describe/trigger, but ended up having a simple root cause like an off-by-one error?
Sometimes. Getting rarer and rarer.
>Also also, coding agents are infamous for generating way more code than is strictly necessary. The 2000 lines of code that the agent generated may well have been only 200 lines had you written it yourself.
Depends on the agent and it's random. This was mostly true probably 5 months ago. It's much less true now.
AI can write 2000 lines faster than you, but you can write the 2000 lines correctly first shot faster than having AI do 10 iterations on these 2000 lines with your guidance to finally get it right
I know that a better plan could mean fewer iterations, but again that extends the time you need to spend on that plan => the total time of the AI solution
Right but those 10 iterations only take up prompt writing time. When the agent is executing I move onto other tasks in parallel. AI is faster when you parallelize your work flow.
2 replies →
Again it's not about typing speed. High level plans simply don't work very well, especially for big tasks where the optimal solution actually would take 2k lines. Unless you are building something that is extremely generic, AI coming up with the optimal solution rarely ever happens.
> He is either a liar or like many other people lacks skill in using AI
Not a liar, and I'm sorry to say, but AI really doesn't take much skill to use. People who say such statements give me the impression that their ceiling for skills is quite low.
Their are areas I do and will continue to use AI and it works well enough. Giving me prototypes for projects I don't have a lot of knowledge about is one thing. But I use those prototypes to learn.
> configure infrastructure
I make templates I can copy and tweak to do this faster than it takes to tell an agent what to do.
> database administration
Don't do that... Sure get it to write you some SQL to update a table, but don't give it DB admin access for fucks sake.
> deploy code
Tell me, how is your agent able to deploy code more effectively than hitting merge on a PR? Or do you simply mean setting up CI/CD for you? That's usually a set and forget thing that doesn't take much time, so I'd rather do it myself.
>Again it's not about typing speed. High level plans simply don't work very well, especially for big tasks where the optimal solution actually would take 2k lines. Unless you are building something that is extremely generic, AI coming up with the optimal solution rarely ever happens.
Nope. Not universally true. It depends on randomness of the rng, the type of task, the agent, and also the current state of AI. Right now for frontier models... what you're saying is generally true only in the minority of times ime.
>Not a liar, and I'm sorry to say, but AI really doesn't take much skill to use. People who say such statements give me the impression that their ceiling for skills is quite low.
It does take a little skill. Very little and it requires new habits that are harder to pick up. For example. I never work on one project at a time anymore. I work on 5 projects and context switch between all of them. Prompt, switch, come back, prompt, switch, prompt switch, review... etc. That takes getting used to.
>I make templates I can copy and tweak to do this faster than it takes to tell an agent what to do.
I have a huge change, and within that change the agent does this automatically.
>Don't do that... Sure get it to write you some SQL to update a table, but don't give it DB admin access for fucks sake.
You can fuck off prick, don't fucking talk like that to my face. I do it and I have no problems with it. If you don't want to, that's your own fucking prerogative.
>Tell me, how is your agent able to deploy code more effectively than hitting merge on a PR? Or do you simply mean setting up CI/CD for you? That's usually a set and forget thing that doesn't take much time, so I'd rather do it myself.
Because the agent merges for me. Prompt: "Complete task A". Agent: "Task completed", Me: "reviewed and good to go"
The agent then does it's thing. Of course there's always some adjustments and more conversation then this but that's the jist of it.