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You know what is the most ridiculous part in this whole story - if coding agents worked nearly as well as the hype people are selling it - why is Gemini CLI app

You know what is the most ridiculous part in this whole story - if coding agents worked nearly as well as the hype people are selling it - why is Gemini CLI app so shit ? Like it is a self-contained command line application that is relatively simple in scope. Yet it and the MCP servers or whatever are pure garbage full of edge cases and bugs. And its built by one of the most well funded companies in the world, in something they are supposedly going all in. And whole industry is pouring billions in to this. Where are the real world productivity boosts and results ? Why do all LLM coding tools suck so bad ? Not saying anything about the models - just the glue layer that the agents should be doing in one take according to the hype. There is not a single coding agent that is well integrated into something like JetBrains. Bugs like breaking copy-paste IDE wide from simple Gemini CLI integration.

smokel 1y ago
Coding agents are very new. They seem very promising, and a lot of people see some potential value, and are eager to be part of the hype. If you don't like them, simply avoid them and try not to get upset about it. If it's all nonsense it will soon fizzle out. If the potential is realized one can always join in later.
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  And yet you have people here claiming to build entire apps with AI. You have CEOs saying agents are replacing devs - but even the companies building these models fail at executing on software development. People like Jensen saying coding is dead when his main selling point is software lock-in to their ecosystem hardware. When you evaluate hype and the artifacts things don't really line up. It's not really true that you can just ignore the hype because these things impact decision making, investments etc. Sure we might figure out this was a dead end in 5 years, meanwhile SW dev industry collectively could have been decimated in the anticipation of AI and misaligned investment.
  - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    A CEO is just a person like you and me. Having the title "CEO" doesn't make them right or wrong. It means they may have a more informed opinion than a layperson and that if they're the CEO of a large company that they have enough money that they can hold onto a badly performing position for longer than the average person can. You can become a CEO too if you found a company and take that role. In the meantime if you're a software practitioner you probably have more insight into these tools than a disconnected large company CEO. Just read their opinions and move on. Don't read them at all if you find them distracting.
    - rafaelmn 1y ago
      What I am saying is these people are the decision makers. They chose where the money goes, what gets invested in, etc. The outcomes of their decisions might be measurable/determined as wrong years down the line - but I will be impacted immediately as someone in the industry. It's the same shit as all the other VC funded money losing "disruptions" - they might go out of business eventually - but they destroyed a lot of value and impacted the whole industry negatively in the long run. Those companies that got destroyed don't just spring back and thing magically return to equilibrium. Likewise developers will get screwed because of AI hype. People will leave the industry, salaries will drop because of allocations, students will avoid it. It only works out if AI actually delivers in the expected time frame.
      - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
        Decision makers are wrong all the time. Have you ever worked at a startup? Startup founders get decisions wrong constantly. We can extrapolate and catastrophize anything. The reason CEOs are constantly jumping onto the bandwagon of new is because if a new legitimately disruptive technology comes around that you don't get behind, you're toast. A good example of that was the last tech boom which created companies like Meta and felled companies like Blackberry. In my experience the "catastrophe hype", the feeling that the hype will disrupt and ruin the industry, is just as misplaced as the hype around the new. At the end of the day large corporations have a hard time changing due to huge layers of bureaucracies that arose to mitigate risk. Smaller companies and startups move quickly but are used to frequently changing direction to stay ahead of the market due to things often out of their control (like changing tariff rates.) If you write code just use the tools from time-to-time and incorporate them in your workflow as you see fit.
- michaelt 1y ago
  > Coding agents are very new. Surely these coding agents, MCP servers and suchlike are being coded with their own tooling? The tooling that, if you listen to the hype, is as smart as a dozen PhDs and is winning gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad? Shouldn't coding agents be secure on day 1, if they're truly written by such towering, superhuman intellects? If the tool vendors themselves can't coax respectable code out of their product, what hope do us mere mortals have?
  - smokel 1y ago
    You seem to be confusing several things. The gold medal IMO is not won by agentic coding software.
- moomoo11 1y ago
  We need data from diverse sets of people. From beginners/noobs to mid levels to advanced. Then, filter that data to find meaningful nuggets. I run up 200-300M tokens of usage per month with AI coding agents, consider myself technically strong as I'm building a technical platform for industry using a decade of experience as a platform engineer and building all sorts of stuff. I can quantify about 30% productivity boost using these agents compared to before I started using Cursor and CC. 30% is meaningful, but it isn't 2x my performance. There are times when the agents do something deranged that actually loses me time. There are times when the agents do something well and save me time. I personally dismiss most of the "spectacular" feedback from noobs because it is not helpful. We have always had easier barriers to entry in SWE, and I'd argue that like 80% of people are naturally filtered out (laid off, can't find work, go do something else) because they never learn how the computer (memory, network, etc.) _actually_ works. Like automatic trans made driving more accessible, but it didn't necessarily make drivers better because there is more to driving than just controlling the car. I also dismiss the feedback from "super seniors" aka people who never grew in their careers. Of the 20% who don't get filtered out, 80% are basically on Autopilot. These are the employees who just do their jobs, are reliable enough, and won't cry that they don't get a raise because they know they will get destroyed interviewing somewhere else. Again, opinion rejected mostly. Now the average team (say it has 10 people) will have 2 outstanding engineers, and 8 line item expenses. The 2 outstanding engineers are probably doing 80% of the work because they're operating at 130% against baseline. The worst will get worse, the best will get better. And we'll be back to where we started until we have better tooling for the best of the best. We will cut some expenses, and then things will eventually normalize again until the next cycle.
- pydry 1y ago
  >If you don't like them, simply avoid them and try not to get upset about it. If it's all nonsense it will soon fizzle out. If the potential is realized one can always join in later. I'd love to but if multiple past hype cycles have taught me anything it's that hiring managers will NOT be sane about this stuff. If you want to maintain employability in tech you generally have to play along with the nonsense of the day. The FOMO about this agentic coding stuff is on another level, too, so the level to which you will have to play along will be commensurately higher. Capital can stay irrational way longer than you can stay solvent and to be honest, Ive never seen it froth at the mouth this much ever.
  - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    > hiring managers will NOT be sane about this stuff Do you have an example of this? I have never dealt with this. The most I've had to do is seem more enthusiastic about <shift left/cloud/kubernetes/etc> to the recruiter than I actually am. Hiring managers often understand that newer technologies are just evolutions of older ones and I've had some fun conversations about how things like kubernetes are just evolutions of existing patterns around Terraform.
    - rafaelmn 1y ago
      > Shopify's CEO Tobi Lütke recently made headlines by issuing a bold mandate: AI is now mandatory across the organisation
      - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
        That's not a hiring manager. Honestly, what does "AI is now mandatory" even mean? Do LLM code reviewers count? Can I add a `CLAUDE.md` file into my repo and tick the box? How is this requirement enforced? Also I mean, plenty of companies I interview at have requirements I'm not willing to accept. For example I will not accept either fully remote roles nor fully in person roles. Because I'm working hybrid roles, I insist my commute needs to be within a certain amount of time. At my current experience level I also only insist in working in certain positions on certain things. There is a minimum compensation structure and benefits allotment that I am willing to accept. Employment is an agreement and I only accept the agreement if it matches certain parameters of my own. What are your expectations for employment? That employers need to have as open a net as possible? I'll be honest if I extrapolate based on your comments I have this fuzzy impression of an anxious software engineer worried about employment becoming more difficult. Is that the angle that this is coming from?
- pharrington 1y ago
  Individuals trying to avoid the garbage products is one side of the social relation. Another side of the social relation is the multibillion dollar company actively warring for you attention—flooding all of your information sources and abusing every psychological tool in its kit to get you to buy into their garbage products. Informed individuals have a small amount of fault, but the overwhelming fault is with Google, Claude, etc.
eitally 1y ago
What I wonder (and possibly someone here can comment) is whether Google (or MSFT) are using the same commercially available tools for LLM-augmented coding as we see, or if the internal tooling is different?
- foobarian 1y ago
  Maybe the internal users are exempted from having to use those tools? /s
jdsully 1y ago
The gemini web UI is also the most buggy thing I've ever used and its relatively simple. Its always losing track of chats, the document editor doesn't work properly if you try to make your own edits. Just a general nightmare to put up with.
Lerc 1y ago
>if coding agents worked nearly as well as the hype people are selling it I don't feel like their capabilities are substantially oversold. I think we are shown what they can do, what they can't do, and what they can't do reliably. I only really encounter the idea that they are expected be nigh on infallible by people when people highlight a flaw as if it were proof that there is a house of cards held up by the feature they have revealed to be flawed The problems in LLMs are myriad. Finding problems and weaknesses is how they get addressed. They will never be perfect. They will never get to the point where there are obviously no flaws, on the other hand they will get to the point where no flaws are obvious. Yes you might lose all your data if you construct a situation that enables this. Imagine not having backups of your hard drive. Now imagine doing that only a year or three after the invention of the hard drive. Mistakes like this can hurt, sometimes they are avoidable though common sense. Sometimes the only way to realise the risk is to be burnt by it. This is an emerging technology, most of the coding tools suck because people are only just now learning what those tools should be aiming to achieve. Those tools that suck are the data points guiding us to better tools. Many people expect reat things from AI in the future. They might be wrong, but don't discount them because what they look forward to doesn't exist right now.o On the other hand there are those who are attempting to build production infrastructure on immature technology. I'm ok with that if their eyes are wide open to the risk they face. Less so if they conceal that risk from their customers.
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  >I don't feel like their capabilities are substantially oversold. I think we are shown what they can do, what they can't do, and what they can't do reliably. > Mark Zuckerberg wants AI to do half of Meta's coding by 2026 > Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang would not have studied computer science today if he were a student today. He urges mastering the real world for the next AI wave. > Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff just announced that due to a 30% productivity boost brought by AI tools, the company will stop hiring software engineers in 2025. I don't know what narratives you have been following - but these are the people that decide where money goes in our industry.
  - Lerc 1y ago
ericmcer 1y ago
That is one of the scariest parts of humanity. I want to cheer for Google/Windows/Apple because if they succeed in huge ways it means we cracked the formula for progress. It means if we take resources and highly educated people and throw them at a problem we will solve it. The fact that those companies continually fail or get outmaneuvered by small teams with no money means there is not a consistent formula for success. No one wants monopolies, but the smartest people with infinite resources failing at consumer technology problems is scary when you extrapolate that to existential problem like a meteor.

smokel 1y ago

Coding agents are very new. They seem very promising, and a lot of people see some potential value, and are eager to be part of the hype. If you don't like them, simply avoid them and try not to get upset about it. If it's all nonsense it will soon fizzle out. If the potential is realized one can always join in later.

rafaelmn 1y ago
And yet you have people here claiming to build entire apps with AI. You have CEOs saying agents are replacing devs - but even the companies building these models fail at executing on software development. People like Jensen saying coding is dead when his main selling point is software lock-in to their ecosystem hardware. When you evaluate hype and the artifacts things don't really line up. It's not really true that you can just ignore the hype because these things impact decision making, investments etc. Sure we might figure out this was a dead end in 5 years, meanwhile SW dev industry collectively could have been decimated in the anticipation of AI and misaligned investment.
- Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  A CEO is just a person like you and me. Having the title "CEO" doesn't make them right or wrong. It means they may have a more informed opinion than a layperson and that if they're the CEO of a large company that they have enough money that they can hold onto a badly performing position for longer than the average person can. You can become a CEO too if you found a company and take that role. In the meantime if you're a software practitioner you probably have more insight into these tools than a disconnected large company CEO. Just read their opinions and move on. Don't read them at all if you find them distracting.
  - rafaelmn 1y ago
    What I am saying is these people are the decision makers. They chose where the money goes, what gets invested in, etc. The outcomes of their decisions might be measurable/determined as wrong years down the line - but I will be impacted immediately as someone in the industry. It's the same shit as all the other VC funded money losing "disruptions" - they might go out of business eventually - but they destroyed a lot of value and impacted the whole industry negatively in the long run. Those companies that got destroyed don't just spring back and thing magically return to equilibrium. Likewise developers will get screwed because of AI hype. People will leave the industry, salaries will drop because of allocations, students will avoid it. It only works out if AI actually delivers in the expected time frame.
    - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
      Decision makers are wrong all the time. Have you ever worked at a startup? Startup founders get decisions wrong constantly. We can extrapolate and catastrophize anything. The reason CEOs are constantly jumping onto the bandwagon of new is because if a new legitimately disruptive technology comes around that you don't get behind, you're toast. A good example of that was the last tech boom which created companies like Meta and felled companies like Blackberry. In my experience the "catastrophe hype", the feeling that the hype will disrupt and ruin the industry, is just as misplaced as the hype around the new. At the end of the day large corporations have a hard time changing due to huge layers of bureaucracies that arose to mitigate risk. Smaller companies and startups move quickly but are used to frequently changing direction to stay ahead of the market due to things often out of their control (like changing tariff rates.) If you write code just use the tools from time-to-time and incorporate them in your workflow as you see fit.
michaelt 1y ago
> Coding agents are very new. Surely these coding agents, MCP servers and suchlike are being coded with their own tooling? The tooling that, if you listen to the hype, is as smart as a dozen PhDs and is winning gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad? Shouldn't coding agents be secure on day 1, if they're truly written by such towering, superhuman intellects? If the tool vendors themselves can't coax respectable code out of their product, what hope do us mere mortals have?
- smokel 1y ago
  You seem to be confusing several things. The gold medal IMO is not won by agentic coding software.
moomoo11 1y ago
We need data from diverse sets of people. From beginners/noobs to mid levels to advanced. Then, filter that data to find meaningful nuggets. I run up 200-300M tokens of usage per month with AI coding agents, consider myself technically strong as I'm building a technical platform for industry using a decade of experience as a platform engineer and building all sorts of stuff. I can quantify about 30% productivity boost using these agents compared to before I started using Cursor and CC. 30% is meaningful, but it isn't 2x my performance. There are times when the agents do something deranged that actually loses me time. There are times when the agents do something well and save me time. I personally dismiss most of the "spectacular" feedback from noobs because it is not helpful. We have always had easier barriers to entry in SWE, and I'd argue that like 80% of people are naturally filtered out (laid off, can't find work, go do something else) because they never learn how the computer (memory, network, etc.) _actually_ works. Like automatic trans made driving more accessible, but it didn't necessarily make drivers better because there is more to driving than just controlling the car. I also dismiss the feedback from "super seniors" aka people who never grew in their careers. Of the 20% who don't get filtered out, 80% are basically on Autopilot. These are the employees who just do their jobs, are reliable enough, and won't cry that they don't get a raise because they know they will get destroyed interviewing somewhere else. Again, opinion rejected mostly. Now the average team (say it has 10 people) will have 2 outstanding engineers, and 8 line item expenses. The 2 outstanding engineers are probably doing 80% of the work because they're operating at 130% against baseline. The worst will get worse, the best will get better. And we'll be back to where we started until we have better tooling for the best of the best. We will cut some expenses, and then things will eventually normalize again until the next cycle.
pydry 1y ago
>If you don't like them, simply avoid them and try not to get upset about it. If it's all nonsense it will soon fizzle out. If the potential is realized one can always join in later. I'd love to but if multiple past hype cycles have taught me anything it's that hiring managers will NOT be sane about this stuff. If you want to maintain employability in tech you generally have to play along with the nonsense of the day. The FOMO about this agentic coding stuff is on another level, too, so the level to which you will have to play along will be commensurately higher. Capital can stay irrational way longer than you can stay solvent and to be honest, Ive never seen it froth at the mouth this much ever.
- Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  > hiring managers will NOT be sane about this stuff Do you have an example of this? I have never dealt with this. The most I've had to do is seem more enthusiastic about <shift left/cloud/kubernetes/etc> to the recruiter than I actually am. Hiring managers often understand that newer technologies are just evolutions of older ones and I've had some fun conversations about how things like kubernetes are just evolutions of existing patterns around Terraform.
  - rafaelmn 1y ago
    > Shopify's CEO Tobi Lütke recently made headlines by issuing a bold mandate: AI is now mandatory across the organisation
    - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
      That's not a hiring manager. Honestly, what does "AI is now mandatory" even mean? Do LLM code reviewers count? Can I add a `CLAUDE.md` file into my repo and tick the box? How is this requirement enforced? Also I mean, plenty of companies I interview at have requirements I'm not willing to accept. For example I will not accept either fully remote roles nor fully in person roles. Because I'm working hybrid roles, I insist my commute needs to be within a certain amount of time. At my current experience level I also only insist in working in certain positions on certain things. There is a minimum compensation structure and benefits allotment that I am willing to accept. Employment is an agreement and I only accept the agreement if it matches certain parameters of my own. What are your expectations for employment? That employers need to have as open a net as possible? I'll be honest if I extrapolate based on your comments I have this fuzzy impression of an anxious software engineer worried about employment becoming more difficult. Is that the angle that this is coming from?
pharrington 1y ago
Individuals trying to avoid the garbage products is one side of the social relation. Another side of the social relation is the multibillion dollar company actively warring for you attention—flooding all of your information sources and abusing every psychological tool in its kit to get you to buy into their garbage products. Informed individuals have a small amount of fault, but the overwhelming fault is with Google, Claude, etc.

eitally 1y ago

What I wonder (and possibly someone here can comment) is whether Google (or MSFT) are using the same commercially available tools for LLM-augmented coding as we see, or if the internal tooling is different?

foobarian 1y ago
Maybe the internal users are exempted from having to use those tools? /s

jdsully 1y ago

The gemini web UI is also the most buggy thing I've ever used and its relatively simple. Its always losing track of chats, the document editor doesn't work properly if you try to make your own edits. Just a general nightmare to put up with.

Lerc 1y ago

>if coding agents worked nearly as well as the hype people are selling it I don't feel like their capabilities are substantially oversold. I think we are shown what they can do, what they can't do, and what they can't do reliably. I only really encounter the idea that they are expected be nigh on infallible by people when people highlight a flaw as if it were proof that there is a house of cards held up by the feature they have revealed to be flawed The problems in LLMs are myriad. Finding problems and weaknesses is how they get addressed. They will never be perfect. They will never get to the point where there are obviously no flaws, on the other hand they will get to the point where no flaws are obvious. Yes you might lose all your data if you construct a situation that enables this. Imagine not having backups of your hard drive. Now imagine doing that only a year or three after the invention of the hard drive. Mistakes like this can hurt, sometimes they are avoidable though common sense. Sometimes the only way to realise the risk is to be burnt by it. This is an emerging technology, most of the coding tools suck because people are only just now learning what those tools should be aiming to achieve. Those tools that suck are the data points guiding us to better tools. Many people expect reat things from AI in the future. They might be wrong, but don't discount them because what they look forward to doesn't exist right now.o On the other hand there are those who are attempting to build production infrastructure on immature technology. I'm ok with that if their eyes are wide open to the risk they face. Less so if they conceal that risk from their customers.

rafaelmn 1y ago
>I don't feel like their capabilities are substantially oversold. I think we are shown what they can do, what they can't do, and what they can't do reliably. > Mark Zuckerberg wants AI to do half of Meta's coding by 2026 > Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang would not have studied computer science today if he were a student today. He urges mastering the real world for the next AI wave. > Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff just announced that due to a 30% productivity boost brought by AI tools, the company will stop hiring software engineers in 2025. I don't know what narratives you have been following - but these are the people that decide where money goes in our industry.
- Lerc 1y ago

ericmcer 1y ago

That is one of the scariest parts of humanity. I want to cheer for Google/Windows/Apple because if they succeed in huge ways it means we cracked the formula for progress. It means if we take resources and highly educated people and throw them at a problem we will solve it. The fact that those companies continually fail or get outmaneuvered by small teams with no money means there is not a consistent formula for success. No one wants monopolies, but the smartest people with infinite resources failing at consumer technology problems is scary when you extrapolate that to existential problem like a meteor.