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My 2 cents, AI tools benefit from standard software best practices just like everyone else. I use Devcontainers in vscode so that the agent can't blow up my hos

by lumost 1y ago

My 2 cents, AI tools benefit from standard software best practices just like everyone else. I use Devcontainers in vscode so that the agent can't blow up my host machine, I use 1 git commit per AI "task", and have CI/CD coverage for even my hobby projects now. When I go to production, I use CDK + self-mutating pipelines to manage deployments. Having a read only replica of the prod database available via MCP is great, blanket permissive credentials is insane.

zwnow 1y ago
People will do anything to excuse using AI to code their shit. If it requires that much work and fine tuning to get a agent running for your current task, where's the benefit? Instead of building a project you now spend all your time fine tuning an agent and optimizing on how you want to work with it. Why cant people just admit that we aren't "there" yet. Let the bubble pop.
- TechDebtDevin 1y ago
  This. Everytime ive tried to do anything of any complexity these things blow up, and i spend almost as much time toying with the thing as it would have taken to read docs and implement from scratch.
  - Roark66 1y ago
    Try breaking it up into smaller pieces. Give it your existing code and tell it to do it in same style. Or give it examples that do the similar things you wrote. Also don't expect chatgpt to ever be as good as Claude for example . Oh and copilot is a joke for anything remotely serious.
    - lumost 1y ago
      The latest copilot pricing for Claude sonnet 4 is fantastic. I get 1500 agent sessions for $40/month
    - ofjcihen 1y ago
      I wrote this elsewhere but it works here too: “You’re just not doing it right. Have you tried upgrading to Claude 9000 edition/writing a novels worth of guardrails/using this obscure ‘AI FIRST’ IDE/creating a Goldberg machine of agents to check the code?”
    - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
      I fall back to people saying this are being dishonest, or not dealing with anything large. There are some problems that you can't just "make smaller" Secondly, I write VERY strongly typed code, commented && documented well. I build lots of "micro-pkgs" in larger monorepos. My functions are pretty modular, have tests and are <100-150 lines. No matter how much I try all the techniques, and my baseline fits well into LLM workflows, it doesn't take away from the fact that It cannot one shot on anything over 1-2k lines of code. Sure, we can go back and forth with the linter until it pumps out something that will compile. This will take a while, in which I could have used something like auto-complete / co-pilot to just write the boilerplate, and fill it in myself in a shorter amount of time than it takes for the agent to reason about a large context. Then if it does eventually get something "complex" to compile (after spending a ton of your credits/money) Often times, it will have taken a shortcut to do so and doesn't actually do what you wanted it to. Now I can refactor this into something usable and sometimes that is faster than doing it myself. But 8/10 times I waste 2 hours paying money for an LLM to gaslight me, throw out all the code and just write it myself in 1.5 hours. I can break down a 1-2k line task into smaller prompts tasks too. but sorry I didn't learn to program to become a project manager for a "Artifically Intelligent" machine
  - notTooFarGone 1y ago
    I highly suspect the people who boast with productivity gains that they don't count their time setting the whole damn thing up as it's just "playing around".
  - mattgreenrocks 1y ago
    If people put the same effort into actually building their skills as they do in forcing AIs to write mediocre code through all sorts of processes they might actually enjoy the process of building software more. But what do I know? Shiny thing must be better because it’s new!
- Roark66 1y ago
  You just need to read the code and ask questions about it if you don't understand it, question everything that seems off. Unfortunately people copy/paste without even reading. Let alone understanding. AI is still a great tool, but it needs to be learned.
  - zwnow 1y ago
    The issue is, it really isn't. It looks like a great tool because it has access to tons of stolen data. Talk to any serious professional in other fields and ask them how accurate these things are. People are just blinded by the light.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- lumost 1y ago
  If you are trying to treat the agent as equivalent to a full time senior engineer that works 10x as fast… then you will be sorely disappointed. Right now the agents are roughly equivalent to a technically proficient intern that writes code at 1000 wpm, loves to rewrite your entire code base, and is familiar with every library and algorithm written 2 years ago. I personally find that I can do a lot with 5 concurrent interns matching the above description.

by lumost 1y ago

zwnow 1y ago

People will do anything to excuse using AI to code their shit. If it requires that much work and fine tuning to get a agent running for your current task, where's the benefit? Instead of building a project you now spend all your time fine tuning an agent and optimizing on how you want to work with it. Why cant people just admit that we aren't "there" yet. Let the bubble pop.

TechDebtDevin 1y ago
This. Everytime ive tried to do anything of any complexity these things blow up, and i spend almost as much time toying with the thing as it would have taken to read docs and implement from scratch.
- Roark66 1y ago
  Try breaking it up into smaller pieces. Give it your existing code and tell it to do it in same style. Or give it examples that do the similar things you wrote. Also don't expect chatgpt to ever be as good as Claude for example . Oh and copilot is a joke for anything remotely serious.
  - lumost 1y ago
    The latest copilot pricing for Claude sonnet 4 is fantastic. I get 1500 agent sessions for $40/month
  - ofjcihen 1y ago
    I wrote this elsewhere but it works here too: “You’re just not doing it right. Have you tried upgrading to Claude 9000 edition/writing a novels worth of guardrails/using this obscure ‘AI FIRST’ IDE/creating a Goldberg machine of agents to check the code?”
  - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
    I fall back to people saying this are being dishonest, or not dealing with anything large. There are some problems that you can't just "make smaller" Secondly, I write VERY strongly typed code, commented && documented well. I build lots of "micro-pkgs" in larger monorepos. My functions are pretty modular, have tests and are <100-150 lines. No matter how much I try all the techniques, and my baseline fits well into LLM workflows, it doesn't take away from the fact that It cannot one shot on anything over 1-2k lines of code. Sure, we can go back and forth with the linter until it pumps out something that will compile. This will take a while, in which I could have used something like auto-complete / co-pilot to just write the boilerplate, and fill it in myself in a shorter amount of time than it takes for the agent to reason about a large context. Then if it does eventually get something "complex" to compile (after spending a ton of your credits/money) Often times, it will have taken a shortcut to do so and doesn't actually do what you wanted it to. Now I can refactor this into something usable and sometimes that is faster than doing it myself. But 8/10 times I waste 2 hours paying money for an LLM to gaslight me, throw out all the code and just write it myself in 1.5 hours. I can break down a 1-2k line task into smaller prompts tasks too. but sorry I didn't learn to program to become a project manager for a "Artifically Intelligent" machine
- notTooFarGone 1y ago
  I highly suspect the people who boast with productivity gains that they don't count their time setting the whole damn thing up as it's just "playing around".
- mattgreenrocks 1y ago
  If people put the same effort into actually building their skills as they do in forcing AIs to write mediocre code through all sorts of processes they might actually enjoy the process of building software more. But what do I know? Shiny thing must be better because it’s new!
Roark66 1y ago
You just need to read the code and ask questions about it if you don't understand it, question everything that seems off. Unfortunately people copy/paste without even reading. Let alone understanding. AI is still a great tool, but it needs to be learned.
- zwnow 1y ago
  The issue is, it really isn't. It looks like a great tool because it has access to tons of stolen data. Talk to any serious professional in other fields and ask them how accurate these things are. People are just blinded by the light.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
lumost 1y ago
If you are trying to treat the agent as equivalent to a full time senior engineer that works 10x as fast… then you will be sorely disappointed. Right now the agents are roughly equivalent to a technically proficient intern that writes code at 1000 wpm, loves to rewrite your entire code base, and is familiar with every library and algorithm written 2 years ago. I personally find that I can do a lot with 5 concurrent interns matching the above description.