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I use AI in my workflow mostly for simple boilerplate, or to troubleshoot issues/docs. I've dipped into agentic work now and again, but never been very impress

I use AI in my workflow mostly for simple boilerplate, or to troubleshoot issues/docs. I've dipped into agentic work now and again, but never been very impressed with the output (well, that there is any functioning output is insanely impressive, but it isn't code I want to be on the hook for complaining). I hear a lot of people saying the same, but similarly a bunch of people I respect saying they barely write code anymore. It feels a little tricky to square these up sometimes. Anyway, really looking forward to trying some if these patterns as the book develops to see if that makes a difference. Understanding how other peopke really use these tools is a big gap for me.

fnands 7mo ago
When was the last time you tried? I think trying agents to do larger tasks was always very hit or miss, up to about the end of last year. In the past couple of months I have found them to have gotten a lot better (and I'm not the only one). My experience with what coding assistants are good for shifted from: smart autocomplete -> targeted changes/additions -> full engineering
- maccard 7mo ago
  I’m not OP but every time I post a comment with this sentiment I get told “the latest models are what you need”. If every 3 months you are saying “it’s ready as long as you use the latest model”, then it wasn’t ready 3 months ago and it’s not likely to be ready now. To answer your question, I’ve tried both Claude code and Antigravity in the last 2 weeks and I’m still finding them struggling. AG with Gemini regularly gets stuck on simple issues and loops until I run out of requests, and Claude still just regularly goes on wild tangents not actually solving the problem.
  - sergiosgc 7mo ago
    Have you tried it with something like OpenSpec? Strangely, taking the time to lay out the steps in a large task helps immensely. It's the difference between the behavior you describe and just letting it run productively for segments of ten or fifteen minutes.
    - maccard 7mo ago
      > Have you tried it with something like OpenSpec? No. The parent comment said I needed a new model, which I've tried. Being told "just try something else aswell" kind of proves the point.
  - anon7000 7mo ago
    I don’t think that’s true. Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 in Cursor have marked the big shift for me. Before that, agentic development mostly made me want to just do it myself, because it was getting stuck or going on tangents. I think it can (and is) shifting very rapidly. Everyone is different, and I’m sure models are better at different types of work (or styles of working), but it doesn’t take much to make it too frustrating to use. Which also means it doesn’t take much to make it super useful.
    - maccard 7mo ago
      > I don’t think that’s true. Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 in Cursor. Opus 4.6 has been out for less than a month. If it was a big shift surely we'd see a massive difference over 4.5 which was november. I think this proves the point, you're not seeing seisimic shifts every 3 months and you're not even clear about which model was the fix. > I think it can (and is) shifting very rapidly. Shifting, maybe. But shuffling deck chairs every 3 months.
      - thunky 7mo ago
        I interpreted their comment to mean 4.5 was the shift, which was nov last year. "Before that" meaning pre 4.5.
  - techpression 7mo ago
    Agree, it’s strange, I will just assume that the people who say this are building react apps. I still have so much ”certainly, I should not do this in a completely insane way, let me fix that” … -400+2. It’s not always, and it is better than it was, but that’s it.
    - fnands 7mo ago
      I'm an ML engineer, so it's mostly been setting up data processing/training code in PyTorch, if that helps.
  - fendy3002 7mo ago
    It depends on what you're handling. Frontend (not css), swagger, mundane CRUD is where it shines. Something more complex that need a bit harder calculation usually make the agents struggling. Especially good to navigate the code if you're unfamiliar with it (the code). If you have known the code for good, you'll find it's usually faster to debug and code by yourself. Opus 4.6 with claude code vscode extension
  - fragmede 7mo ago
    At this point though, after Claude C Compiler, you've got to give us more details to better understand the dichotomy. What do you consider simple issues?
    - maccard 7mo ago
      > At this point though, after Claude C Compiler, Perfect example. You mean the C compiler that literally failed to compile a hello world [0] (which was given in it's readme)? > What do you consider simple issues? Hallucinating APIs for well documented libraries/interfaces, ignoring explicit instructions for how to do things, and making very simple logic errors in 30-100 line scripts. As an example, I asked Claude code to help me with a Roblox game last weekend, and specifically asked it to "create a shop GUI for <X> which scales with the UI, and opens when you press E next to the character". It proceeded to create a GUI with absolute sizings, get stuck on an API hallucination for handling input, and also, when I got it unstuck, it didn't actually work. [0] https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1 https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1
      - fragmede 7mo ago
        Excellent examples, thank you! Shame Claude Code doesn't have sharable chat logs, it would be interesting to see where your Roblox exploration went off the rails.
        nwpwr 7mo ago
        I think you can use https://traces.com https://traces.com for that
    - sarchertech 7mo ago
      Claude C compiler is 100k LOC that doesn’t do anything useful, and cost $20k plus the cost of an expert engineer creating a custom harness and babysitting it. But the most important thing is that they were reverse engineering gcc by using it as an oracle. And it had gcc and thousands of other c compilers in its training set. So if you are a large corporation looking to copy GPL code so that you can use it without worrying about the license, and the project you want to copy is a text transformer with a rigorously defined set of inputs and outputs, have at it.
  - edgyquant 7mo ago
    I thought this too and then I discovered plan mode. If you just prompt agent mode it will be terrible, but coming up with a plan first has really made a big difference and I rarely write code at all now
    - ramoz 7mo ago
      My workflow has become very plan-intensive... including planning of verification+test steps at the end.
- benrutter 7mo ago
  > When was the last time you tried? Pretty recently (a couple weeks ago). I give agentic workflows a go every couple of weeks or so. I should say, I don't find them abysmal, but I tend to work in codebases where I understand them, and the patterns really well. The use cases I've tried so far, do sort of work, just not yet at least, faster than I'm able to actual write the code myself.
- darkwater 7mo ago
  > My experience with what coding assistants are good for shifted from: > smart autocomplete -> targeted changes/additions -> full engineering Define "full engineering". Because if you say "full engineering" I would expect the agent to get some expected product output details as input and produce all by itself the right implementation for the context (i.e. company) it lives in.
  - fnands 7mo ago
    I agree that "full engineering" was a bit broad. I should probably have said something like "agent-only coding"? I.e. the point where the agent writes all the code and you just verify.
    - darkwater 7mo ago
      The "you just verify" part can take indeed a lot of steering and hand-holding to get the right implementation for the current company/department/project context. Otherwise you might be just generating tech debt at scale.
birdfood 7mo ago
I was in the same boat as you until I saw DHH post about how he’s changed his use of agents. In his talk with Lex Fridman his approach was similar to mine and it really felt like a kernel of sanity amongst the hype. So when he said he’s changed his approach I had another look. I’m using agents (Claude code) every day now. I still write code every day too. (So does Dax Raad from OpenCode to throw a bit more weight behind this stance). I’m not convinced the models can own a production code base and that therefore engineers need to maintain their skills sufficiently to be responsible. I find agents helpful for a lot of stuff, usually heavily patterned code with a lot of prior art. I find CC consistently sucks at writing polars code. I honestly don’t enjoy using agents at all and I don’t think anyone can honestly claim they know how this is going to shake out. But I feel by using the tools myself I have a much stronger sense of reality amongst the hype.
- jkhdigital 7mo ago
  I strongly agree with that last statement—I hate using agents because their code smells awful even if it works. But I have to use them now because otherwise I’m going to wake up one day and be 100% obsolete and never even notice how it happened.
lumpilumpi 7mo ago
My experience is that the first iteration output from a single agent is not what I want to be on the hook for. What squares it for me with "not writing code anymore" is the iterative process to improve outputs: 1) Having review loops between agents (spawn separate "reviewer" agents) and clear tests / eval criteria improved results quite a bit for me. 2) Reviewing manually and giving instructions for improvements is necessary to have code I can own
- rsynnott 7mo ago
  Is that… actually faster than just doing it yourself, tho? Like, “I could write the right thing, or I could have this robot write the wrong thing and then nag it til it corrects itself” seems to suggest a fairly obvious choice. I’ve yet to see these things do well on anything but trivial boilerplate.
  - girvo 7mo ago
    In my experience, sometimes. Not that often, depends on the task. The benefit is I can keep some things ticking over while I’m in meetings, to be honest.
  - fragmede 7mo ago
    Think of it like installing Linux. The first time it's absolutely not worth it from a time perspective. But after you've installed it once, you can reuse that installation, and eventually it makes sense and becomes second nature. Eventually that time investment pays dividends. Just like Linux tho, no one's going to force to you to install it and you'll probably go on to have a fine career without ever having touched the stuff.
panstromek 7mo ago
> It feels a little tricky to square these up sometimes. In my experience, this heavily depends on the task, and there's a massive chasm between tasks where it's a good and bad fit. I can definitely imagine people working only on one side of this chasm and being perplexed by the other side.
pkorzeniewski 7mo ago
One thing I rarely see mentioned is that often creating code by hand is simply faster (at least for me) than using AI. Creating a plan for AI, waiting for execution, verifying, prompting again etc. can take more time than just doing it on my own with a plan in my head (and maybe some notes). Creating something from scratch or doing advanced refactoring is almost always faster with AI, but most of my daily tasks are bugs or features that are 10% coding and 90% knowing how to do it.
- abm53 7mo ago
  The rebuttal to this would be that you can do many such tasks in parallel. I’m not sure it’s really true in practice yet, but that would certainly be the claim.
  - paganel 7mo ago
    But can you mentally "keep hold" (for lack of a better term) of those tasks that are getting executed in parallel? Honestly asking. Because, after they're done/have finished executing, I guess you still have to "check" their output, integrate their results into the bigger project they're (supposedly) part of etc, and for me the context-switching required to do all that is mentally taxing. But maybe this only happens because my brain is not young enough, that's why I'm asking.
    - vidarh 7mo ago
      I have the AI integrate their results themselves. That's if anything one of the things they do best. I also have them do reviews and test their own work first before I check it, and that usually makes the remaining verification fairly quick and painless.
    - duskdozer 7mo ago
      I think the difference is that you're applying a standard of correctness or personal understanding of the code you're pushing that is being relaxed in the "agentic workflows"
    - 7mo ago
lelanthran 7mo ago
> I've dipped into agentic work now and again, but never been very impressed with the output (well, that there is any functioning output is insanely impressive, but it isn't code I want to be on the hook for complaining). > I hear a lot of people saying the same, but similarly a bunch of people I respect saying they barely write code anymore. It feels a little tricky to square these up sometimes. It squares up just fine. You ever read a blog post or comment and think "Yeah, this is definitely AI generated"? If you can recognise it, would you accept a blog post, reviewed by you, for your own blog/site? I won't; I'll think "eww" and rewrite. The developers with good AI experiences don't get the same "eww" feeling when reading AI-generated code. The developers with poor AI experiences get that "eww" feeling all the time when reviewing AI code and decide not to accept the code. Well, that's my theory anyway.
- jghn 7mo ago
  I also will rewrite both text and code created by Gen AI. I've found the best workflow for me is not to refine what I've written, but instead to use it to help me get over humps and/or crank through some of the drudgery. And then I go back and edit, fixing any issues I spot and to reshape it to be in my own voice. I do this with code too.
xXSLAYERXx 7mo ago
I still write code but do not push everything off to the agent. Try my best to write small tasks. ~20% of the time I have to get in there. If someone says they're absolutely not writing a line of code they must have amazing guardrails.
adampunk 7mo ago
>It feels a little tricky to square these up sometimes. I don’t think you have to square them because those sentiments are coming from different people. They are also coming from people at different points along the adoption curve. If you are struggling and you see other people struggling at the beginning of the adoption curve it can be quite difficult difficult to understand someone who is further along and does not appear to be struggling. I think a lot of folks who have struggled with these tools do so because both critics and boosters create unrealistic expectations. What I recommend is you keep trying. This is a new skill set. It is a different skill set. Which other skills that existed in the past remain necessary is not known.

fnands 7mo ago

When was the last time you tried? I think trying agents to do larger tasks was always very hit or miss, up to about the end of last year. In the past couple of months I have found them to have gotten a lot better (and I'm not the only one). My experience with what coding assistants are good for shifted from: smart autocomplete -> targeted changes/additions -> full engineering

maccard 7mo ago
I’m not OP but every time I post a comment with this sentiment I get told “the latest models are what you need”. If every 3 months you are saying “it’s ready as long as you use the latest model”, then it wasn’t ready 3 months ago and it’s not likely to be ready now. To answer your question, I’ve tried both Claude code and Antigravity in the last 2 weeks and I’m still finding them struggling. AG with Gemini regularly gets stuck on simple issues and loops until I run out of requests, and Claude still just regularly goes on wild tangents not actually solving the problem.
- sergiosgc 7mo ago
  Have you tried it with something like OpenSpec? Strangely, taking the time to lay out the steps in a large task helps immensely. It's the difference between the behavior you describe and just letting it run productively for segments of ten or fifteen minutes.
  - maccard 7mo ago
    > Have you tried it with something like OpenSpec? No. The parent comment said I needed a new model, which I've tried. Being told "just try something else aswell" kind of proves the point.
- anon7000 7mo ago
  I don’t think that’s true. Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 in Cursor have marked the big shift for me. Before that, agentic development mostly made me want to just do it myself, because it was getting stuck or going on tangents. I think it can (and is) shifting very rapidly. Everyone is different, and I’m sure models are better at different types of work (or styles of working), but it doesn’t take much to make it too frustrating to use. Which also means it doesn’t take much to make it super useful.
  - maccard 7mo ago
    > I don’t think that’s true. Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 in Cursor. Opus 4.6 has been out for less than a month. If it was a big shift surely we'd see a massive difference over 4.5 which was november. I think this proves the point, you're not seeing seisimic shifts every 3 months and you're not even clear about which model was the fix. > I think it can (and is) shifting very rapidly. Shifting, maybe. But shuffling deck chairs every 3 months.
    - thunky 7mo ago
      I interpreted their comment to mean 4.5 was the shift, which was nov last year. "Before that" meaning pre 4.5.
- techpression 7mo ago
  Agree, it’s strange, I will just assume that the people who say this are building react apps. I still have so much ”certainly, I should not do this in a completely insane way, let me fix that” … -400+2. It’s not always, and it is better than it was, but that’s it.
  - fnands 7mo ago
    I'm an ML engineer, so it's mostly been setting up data processing/training code in PyTorch, if that helps.
- fendy3002 7mo ago
  It depends on what you're handling. Frontend (not css), swagger, mundane CRUD is where it shines. Something more complex that need a bit harder calculation usually make the agents struggling. Especially good to navigate the code if you're unfamiliar with it (the code). If you have known the code for good, you'll find it's usually faster to debug and code by yourself. Opus 4.6 with claude code vscode extension
- fragmede 7mo ago
  At this point though, after Claude C Compiler, you've got to give us more details to better understand the dichotomy. What do you consider simple issues?
  - maccard 7mo ago
    > At this point though, after Claude C Compiler, Perfect example. You mean the C compiler that literally failed to compile a hello world [0] (which was given in it's readme)? > What do you consider simple issues? Hallucinating APIs for well documented libraries/interfaces, ignoring explicit instructions for how to do things, and making very simple logic errors in 30-100 line scripts. As an example, I asked Claude code to help me with a Roblox game last weekend, and specifically asked it to "create a shop GUI for <X> which scales with the UI, and opens when you press E next to the character". It proceeded to create a GUI with absolute sizings, get stuck on an API hallucination for handling input, and also, when I got it unstuck, it didn't actually work. [0] https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1 https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1
    - fragmede 7mo ago
      Excellent examples, thank you! Shame Claude Code doesn't have sharable chat logs, it would be interesting to see where your Roblox exploration went off the rails.
      - nwpwr 7mo ago
        I think you can use https://traces.com https://traces.com for that
  - sarchertech 7mo ago
    Claude C compiler is 100k LOC that doesn’t do anything useful, and cost $20k plus the cost of an expert engineer creating a custom harness and babysitting it. But the most important thing is that they were reverse engineering gcc by using it as an oracle. And it had gcc and thousands of other c compilers in its training set. So if you are a large corporation looking to copy GPL code so that you can use it without worrying about the license, and the project you want to copy is a text transformer with a rigorously defined set of inputs and outputs, have at it.
- edgyquant 7mo ago
  I thought this too and then I discovered plan mode. If you just prompt agent mode it will be terrible, but coming up with a plan first has really made a big difference and I rarely write code at all now
  - ramoz 7mo ago
    My workflow has become very plan-intensive... including planning of verification+test steps at the end.
benrutter 7mo ago
> When was the last time you tried? Pretty recently (a couple weeks ago). I give agentic workflows a go every couple of weeks or so. I should say, I don't find them abysmal, but I tend to work in codebases where I understand them, and the patterns really well. The use cases I've tried so far, do sort of work, just not yet at least, faster than I'm able to actual write the code myself.
darkwater 7mo ago
> My experience with what coding assistants are good for shifted from: > smart autocomplete -> targeted changes/additions -> full engineering Define "full engineering". Because if you say "full engineering" I would expect the agent to get some expected product output details as input and produce all by itself the right implementation for the context (i.e. company) it lives in.
- fnands 7mo ago
  I agree that "full engineering" was a bit broad. I should probably have said something like "agent-only coding"? I.e. the point where the agent writes all the code and you just verify.
  - darkwater 7mo ago
    The "you just verify" part can take indeed a lot of steering and hand-holding to get the right implementation for the current company/department/project context. Otherwise you might be just generating tech debt at scale.

birdfood 7mo ago

I was in the same boat as you until I saw DHH post about how he’s changed his use of agents. In his talk with Lex Fridman his approach was similar to mine and it really felt like a kernel of sanity amongst the hype. So when he said he’s changed his approach I had another look. I’m using agents (Claude code) every day now. I still write code every day too. (So does Dax Raad from OpenCode to throw a bit more weight behind this stance). I’m not convinced the models can own a production code base and that therefore engineers need to maintain their skills sufficiently to be responsible. I find agents helpful for a lot of stuff, usually heavily patterned code with a lot of prior art. I find CC consistently sucks at writing polars code. I honestly don’t enjoy using agents at all and I don’t think anyone can honestly claim they know how this is going to shake out. But I feel by using the tools myself I have a much stronger sense of reality amongst the hype.

jkhdigital 7mo ago
I strongly agree with that last statement—I hate using agents because their code smells awful even if it works. But I have to use them now because otherwise I’m going to wake up one day and be 100% obsolete and never even notice how it happened.

lumpilumpi 7mo ago

My experience is that the first iteration output from a single agent is not what I want to be on the hook for. What squares it for me with "not writing code anymore" is the iterative process to improve outputs: 1) Having review loops between agents (spawn separate "reviewer" agents) and clear tests / eval criteria improved results quite a bit for me. 2) Reviewing manually and giving instructions for improvements is necessary to have code I can own

rsynnott 7mo ago
Is that… actually faster than just doing it yourself, tho? Like, “I could write the right thing, or I could have this robot write the wrong thing and then nag it til it corrects itself” seems to suggest a fairly obvious choice. I’ve yet to see these things do well on anything but trivial boilerplate.
- girvo 7mo ago
  In my experience, sometimes. Not that often, depends on the task. The benefit is I can keep some things ticking over while I’m in meetings, to be honest.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  Think of it like installing Linux. The first time it's absolutely not worth it from a time perspective. But after you've installed it once, you can reuse that installation, and eventually it makes sense and becomes second nature. Eventually that time investment pays dividends. Just like Linux tho, no one's going to force to you to install it and you'll probably go on to have a fine career without ever having touched the stuff.

panstromek 7mo ago

> It feels a little tricky to square these up sometimes. In my experience, this heavily depends on the task, and there's a massive chasm between tasks where it's a good and bad fit. I can definitely imagine people working only on one side of this chasm and being perplexed by the other side.

pkorzeniewski 7mo ago

One thing I rarely see mentioned is that often creating code by hand is simply faster (at least for me) than using AI. Creating a plan for AI, waiting for execution, verifying, prompting again etc. can take more time than just doing it on my own with a plan in my head (and maybe some notes). Creating something from scratch or doing advanced refactoring is almost always faster with AI, but most of my daily tasks are bugs or features that are 10% coding and 90% knowing how to do it.

abm53 7mo ago
The rebuttal to this would be that you can do many such tasks in parallel. I’m not sure it’s really true in practice yet, but that would certainly be the claim.
- paganel 7mo ago
  But can you mentally "keep hold" (for lack of a better term) of those tasks that are getting executed in parallel? Honestly asking. Because, after they're done/have finished executing, I guess you still have to "check" their output, integrate their results into the bigger project they're (supposedly) part of etc, and for me the context-switching required to do all that is mentally taxing. But maybe this only happens because my brain is not young enough, that's why I'm asking.
  - vidarh 7mo ago
    I have the AI integrate their results themselves. That's if anything one of the things they do best. I also have them do reviews and test their own work first before I check it, and that usually makes the remaining verification fairly quick and painless.
  - duskdozer 7mo ago
    I think the difference is that you're applying a standard of correctness or personal understanding of the code you're pushing that is being relaxed in the "agentic workflows"
  - 7mo ago

lelanthran 7mo ago

> I've dipped into agentic work now and again, but never been very impressed with the output (well, that there is any functioning output is insanely impressive, but it isn't code I want to be on the hook for complaining). > I hear a lot of people saying the same, but similarly a bunch of people I respect saying they barely write code anymore. It feels a little tricky to square these up sometimes. It squares up just fine. You ever read a blog post or comment and think "Yeah, this is definitely AI generated"? If you can recognise it, would you accept a blog post, reviewed by you, for your own blog/site? I won't; I'll think "eww" and rewrite. The developers with good AI experiences don't get the same "eww" feeling when reading AI-generated code. The developers with poor AI experiences get that "eww" feeling all the time when reviewing AI code and decide not to accept the code. Well, that's my theory anyway.

jghn 7mo ago
I also will rewrite both text and code created by Gen AI. I've found the best workflow for me is not to refine what I've written, but instead to use it to help me get over humps and/or crank through some of the drudgery. And then I go back and edit, fixing any issues I spot and to reshape it to be in my own voice. I do this with code too.

xXSLAYERXx 7mo ago

I still write code but do not push everything off to the agent. Try my best to write small tasks. ~20% of the time I have to get in there. If someone says they're absolutely not writing a line of code they must have amazing guardrails.

adampunk 7mo ago

>It feels a little tricky to square these up sometimes. I don’t think you have to square them because those sentiments are coming from different people. They are also coming from people at different points along the adoption curve. If you are struggling and you see other people struggling at the beginning of the adoption curve it can be quite difficult difficult to understand someone who is further along and does not appear to be struggling. I think a lot of folks who have struggled with these tools do so because both critics and boosters create unrealistic expectations. What I recommend is you keep trying. This is a new skill set. It is a different skill set. Which other skills that existed in the past remain necessary is not known.