Comment by seer

Yeah but I think going back to hand writing bespoke code is not coming back, the genie is out of the bottle.

But we could build much better tooling around keeping the agents honest. The problems you are describing are absolutely real and I see them every they.

One friend of mine had almost a mental breakdown when he just went ahead and drilled a bug producing Claude to the point that it itself admitted it was “a piece of shit”. He knew that arguing with an LLM agent is more than useless, but it was cathartic for sure.

When I encounter a situation like this I always go down to - have I done everything I could to catch these errors in my automated validation, and update it as needed.

Agents are also more than happy to spend tokens refactoring, once you have such a test harness be good enough, producing successively better and more general abstractions is quite easy.

The old rule of thumb of “make it work, make it fast, make it pretty” still applies , just with much much faster iteration speed.

It seems with agents people have forgotten the last 2 steps since they produce a _working_ solution, and it might be hard to justify spending time “cleaning it up”, but this still remains essential.