Comment by deepsummer
14 hours ago
But you could still arrive if you walk instead of using the bicycle. And I am sure you can do the same stitches by hand, it just takes forever.
Same with coding agents. I could do it by hand. It just would take much longer. Often so long that it would be impractical.
You cannot walk 100 miles in a day, but anyone with a bit of training can cycle that in an afternoon. It's not a matter of effort or laziness, it's simply not possible.
The stitching comment is just pedantic. People don't hand stitch like a machine not because they are lazy, it's because it's ineffective and impractical. It's not impossible to drive screws directly into softwood by hand, but you'd never get anything done that way. It's not lazy to choose another method, it's just being an effective worker.
As for coding agents, it's clearly effective to write software without them because we have been doing it for decades so far. It still remains to be seen whether they are laziness (ie. it's just a motor) or if they are actually enabling new possibilities (ie. we get software that really wouldn't have been possible before).
Minor nitpick with your first sentence: I do not believe "anyone with a bit of training" is an accurate way to describe what is required for pedaling a bicycle at 20 mph for 5 solid hours.
At a time when I was in better shape than the average person, the most I ever worked up to was 40 miles, and it was brutal. In my entire middle-aged life, I have met exactly one person who believably claimed to have done 100 miles in a day. I'm sure it's easier than many/most people think, but not 'anyone' easy, with just 'a bit' of training.
Well, I should say I live somewhere very flat. I'm certainly not talking about Tour de France style mountain stages. I'm not used to that at all. Also, for 5 hours most people will need to be in a good group/peloton. Doing it solo, like a time trial, is difficult. But I do think most people could get around 6 hours (16.7mph average) within a year of training in sportive conditions (ie. with some drafting, not strict time trial conditions). When I trained my solo average over 50 miles was 18.6mph and I'm not particularly special.
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Can you write 10k LOC a day without a coding agent?
It's the same issue. You can walk 100 miles. Just not in a day. And you can create 10k LOC without a coding agent. Just not in a day.
I don't think that coding agents enable technical possibilities. They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.
You can't generate 10k LOC in a day with a coding agent either, not if you want to actually understand it and review it (which you must do if you don't want the quality of your work to go into the toilet).
> Can you write 10k LOC a day without a coding agent?
Easily, by writing a code generator. Or disassemble a 1k C program.
> They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.
It’s not economical to have more code. It’s economical to have correct code and the way to do that is with the power of abstraction. Instead of dealings with opcodes, you have assemblers and macros. Then it’s C, next it’s python, and what would have been a 10k program is now just a few lines.