Comment by skydhash
1 day ago
> Meanwhile people here are posting the thesis that agentic development without careful code review results in an unmaintainable application.
> I theorize that this is not something they experienced in practice, because it did not happen for me.
Are you currently maintaining the application? Like it's in production with paying users? You've only been on the app for 4 months. Compare that to something like Emacs that has been going for 40+ years. You can make a better case when you've been on prod for a few years.
By that standard, we could have AGI tomorrow, and I should still not comment.
No, my app is not published yet. It will probably take another month, with hopefully no complications arising out of the AppStore review process.
Then, I hope the ad campaign financials work out to compete with old apps of a lower quality that already boast no less than a million reviews.
I get it, you want me to make a case that can objectively convince you of the usefulness of agentic development without code review.
From my perspective, I have no interest in doing so, and I can only share my experience so far. In a few months time we will know more objectively whether my ambitions paid off.
Until then, you will either have to take my word for the quality of the product, or spend tens to hundreds of hours of effort in trying the approach for yourself. OP's article does not contain any specifics for where and how supposedly agentic development failed him either.
But can't you see how coming out with a strong statement like "i've been doing this, it works" before your app even has a single user and before you've had to contend with any externally filed bug reports and keep the app stable as you fix those and add new features isn't very reasonable?
If anything there are clear counter example to your claim, such as the major provider agent harnesses which are all almost always fully vibe coded, and riddled with bugs and regressions that make using them painful for users. The only reason people put up with it is because competition in the space is still limited.
Don't you think I've fixed bugs and kept the app stable during the 300 hours I have been working on it?
That's why I can say with full confidence that it works.
I doubt it will magically all fall apart the moment an external user touches it, or that I will expand the scope dramatically in the near future.
The agent harnesses are an interesting topic. I believe they have large teams shipping a ton of changes weekly. In that environment, is it realistic to expect rock solid software with such a feature set to be developed in a few months and shipped to 10M users?
2 replies →
> you will either have to take my word for the quality of the product, or spend tens to hundreds of hours of effort in trying the approach for yourself
You're acting like everyone here doesn't have hundreds of hours of experience with LLM coding. We all do, we all know what it's like.
You're simply either lying or wrong. If it's the former, I don't care, you're just an asshole on the internet. If it's the latter, you'll learn eventually and it will be quite painful for you.
I doubt that.
I believe many of you use it at work, where you need to get code through review, or voluntarily review the generated code.
Otherwise I have no explanation as to how agentic development is failing for you, while it continues to work on my side in a large code base.
>You're acting like everyone here doesn't have hundreds of hours of experience with LLM coding. We all do, we all know what it's like.
But the opinions expressed are basically polar opposites, so there's clearly something to this.
The easy explanation IMO is that it takes some time to learn how to use LLM's effectively for system development. It's still skilled work, just different skills.
Some put in that effort and see results, others are annoyed that the reality doesn't match the hype and bail.
>You're simply either lying or wrong.
Surely it's possible that he was able to make it work even though you didn't?