6 ms·
Don't worry, it's probably only the impostor syndrome. Your development skills are still relevant. Think of agents as junior developers that assist you in codin
by selcuka 1y ago
Don't worry, it's probably only the impostor syndrome. Your development skills are still relevant. Think of agents as junior developers that assist you in coding tasks, whom you constantly need to mentor, review, and correct.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoCan we all agree that "mentoring" LLMs is actually a waste of time, please? The reason we invest this time in Junior devs is so they improve. LLMs do not
- leptons 1y ago"AI" has been so inconsistent. On one day it anticipates almost every line I am coding, the next day it's like we've never worked together before.
- dotancohen 1y agoI see you've never dated twins.
- simonw 1y agoI had a fascinating conversation about this the other day. An engineer was telling me about his LLM process, which is effectively this: 1. Collaborate on a detailed spec 2. Have it implement that spec 3. Spend a lot of time on review and QA - is the code good? Does the feature work well? 4. Take lessons from that process and write them down for the LLM to use next time - using CLAUDE.md or similar That last step is the interesting one. You're right: humans improve, LLMs don't... but that means it's on us as their users to manage the improvement cycle by using every feature iteration as as opportunity to improve how they work. I've heard similar things from a few people now: by constantly iterating on their CLAUDE.md - adding extra instructions every time the bot makes a mistake, telling it to do things like always write the tests first, run the linter, reuse the BaseView class when building a new application view, etc - they get wildly better results over time.
- input_sh 1y agoI don't buy your last sentence at all. AGENTS.md is just a place to put stuff you don't want to tell LLMs over and over again. They're not magical instructions LLMs follow 100% of the time, they don't carry any additional importance over what you put into the prompt manually. Your carefully curated AGENTS.md is only really useful at the very beginning of the conversation, but the longer the conversation gets, the less important those tokens on the top are. Somewhere around 100k tokens AGENTS.md might as well not exit, I constantly have to "remind it" of the very first paragraph there. Go start a conversation and contradict what's written in AGENTS.md half way through the problem. Which of the two contradicting statements will take preference? The latter one! Therefore, all the time you've spent curating your AGENTS.md is the time you've wasted thinking you're "teaching" LLMs anything.
- helloplanets 1y agoWhether the tokens are created manually or programmatically isn't really relevant here. The order and amount of tokens is, in combination with the ingestion -> output logic which the LLM API / inference engine operates on. Many current models definitely have the tendency to start veering off after 100k tokens, which makes context pruning important as well. What if you just automatically append the .md file at the end of the context, instead of prepending at the start, and add a note that the instructions in the .md file should always be prioritized?
- dotancohen 1y agoWe really should be sharing wisdom about AGENTS.md files here.
- radarsat1 1y agoI thought about making some kind of community project where people could contribute their lines to a common file, and even some kind of MCP server or RAG system that automatically selects relevant "rules" given a certain project context. Do you think there would be interest in something like that?
- selcuka 1y ago> Can we all agree that "mentoring" LLMs is actually a waste of time, please? Sorry, we can't. While it's true that you can't really modify the underlying model, updating your AGENTS.md (or whatever) with your expected coding style, best practices, common gotchas etc is a type of mentoring.
- dotancohen 1y agoMaybe we need an Ask HN to share AGENTS.md files.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago> updating your AGENTS.md (or whatever) with your expected coding style, best practices, common gotchas etc is a type of mentoring We'll have to agree to disagree, because I don't think that has anything remotely in common with mentoring
- selcuka 1y ago> We'll have to agree to disagree Fair enough. But don't you think giving a junior a handbook you wrote is mentoring? They may not be able to memorise it, but they now have a handbook that they can look up things.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago> LLMs do not Maybe not in the session you interact with, however we are in a 'learning' phase now where I'm confident enough usage of AI coding agents is tracked and analyzed by its developers; this feedback cycle can in theory produce newer and better generations of AI coding agents.
- ruszki 1y agoSo my development skills are still relevant because I need to use my managerial skills?
- prerok 1y agoI would not call these managerial skills: these are skills of lead engineers. Management does not really look at the code, right?
- ruszki 1y agoNot just the “management” needs managerial skills.
- kmijyiyxfbklao 1y agoManagers with development skills are almost always better, because they can dive into the details if there's ever a problem.
- ruszki 1y agoThat’s true, however the current vibe coding ecosystem is clearly not written in this mindset. You will have a hard time to dive into anything if you previously generated 2k LOC/hour, which is absolutely possible. Typing was never the bottleneck, understanding, and knowing that you did something well was always the real bottleneck. LLMs make this even worse. You can move Jira tickets to done faster with it, but even bad developers can do that many times compared to better ones, because for example they mindlessly copy-paste StackOverflow answers whose half of the code is absolutely not necessary, but they don’t care, because “it works”… until it doesn’t.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoJunior developers or maybe even better, outsourced developers - there's a big segment of software engineering that involves writing requirements and checking the work of an external software development company, with many companies heavily dependent on it (as they outsourced part of their core business, e.g. mainframes, SAP, whatever).
- anthonypasq 1y agoYou think theyre still gonna be juniors 5 years from now? A couple years ago they could barely even write a function
- codyb 1y agoThe gains seem to be leveling to me but I'm not using them as much as others. Still seems like people are saying the same things when the first Claude came out. I can get it do stuff if I'm very specific, stand over it's shoulder, know exactly what I want, break it down into small chunks. The thing for me is... at that point, writing the code's the least time consuming part of the process half the time. I think for things like translating some code in JS with JSDocs to TypeScript I may give this a go. But for regular development work I'll probably skip it. That being said... no one lets me code anymore. It's just confluence docs with Figma architecture diagrams these days. I'd probably just introduce SQL injection vulnerabilities if they let me near an editor these days
- anthonypasq 1y agoi do love it when people opine on things they literally dont even use...
- codyb 1y agoI'm still sitting here reading a lot of code generated by it, but sure. Looks a lot like the code I was reading generated by it a long time ago.
- selcuka 1y agoNo, I don't think they will always be junior developers. Obviously there will be a day that they will surpass humans. However, the progress doesn't look linear with the current technology, and I don't expect to see the same big jump in the next 5 years as we've seen in the last 5 unless we discover a disruptive, new technology. This can also be observed by comparing models with ~3B, ~30B, and ~300B parameters. You can see a huge performance boost when going from 3B to 30B, but we don't see the same when going to 300B. Simply adding 10x more RAM and GPU power brings diminishing returns.