3 ms·

How is that different compared to a human dev that would miss bugs?

by NotGMan 7mo ago

Grimblewald 7mo ago
The ability to plan long term and anticipate flow on errors.
- onion2k 7mo ago
  You chosen AI agent can and will plan as far ahead as you tell it to plan. If you tell it to do things in iteration 1 that might block it in iteration 3 then you should have told it more about where you want to go back in iteration 1.
  - Grimblewald 7mo ago
    At some point I have to describe what I need with such a level of detail and precision, that if I had chosen to wrote it in my language of interest I'd have had the code I wanted long before i finish writing all the boundry conditions, safe guards, long term pitfalls etc. Thats if the system even respects all of those things, it might just lose track of some instruction at some point or make some bs placeholder and now we're back to bug hunting, only i'm now wading through code that is best described as slop.
    - onion2k 7mo ago
      You're saying that projects need to be waterfall rather than Agile in order to avoid making architecture mistakes you'll regret later. The problem with that is that as you build you learn things, and that changes the plan. Consequently those mistakes are inevitable. What you should do is an approach where you have a high level plan up front, and detailed plans about the specific features as you need them. Mistakes will still happen but you'll be able to see them, and correct them, faster.
      - Grimblewald 7mo ago
        No, I am saying that you are trading what you spend effort on when using LLM's. Do you give up the effort of writing for the effort of review? Weather you should and if you will benefit really depends on your expertise and skill set. If you're a novice, or even intermediate, use AI in a feedback kind of way, see if it can pinpoint and explain problems with your current code and offer feedback/recommendations. Not code, but dot point human language feedback like you'd get from a senior dev. If the AI is writing code that is beyond what you could produce yourself, you have no business trusting the code the AI produces. This is because, as anyone who can produce high level code will tell you, AI is wrong too frequently to blindly trust. You have to engage critically with output. Full auto is a disaster waiting to happen. The problem is, for many, good looking but fundamentally flawed code is indistinguishable from the real deal, and so they simply outsource their ability to critically think to a thing that simply cannot. This is a big problem and the evidence for this claim is littered throughout this comment section.
nomercy400 7mo ago
Yes, this is simply 'technical debt'. They should try to fix technical debt before going to the next round. Of course Claude can probably also do this.
duskdozer 7mo ago
The people using these programs are generating massive amounts of code, and you won't convince me they're actually carefully understanding most of it, if they even read it all. And it bypasses the first verification step where you are actively typing in the code that will be run.
kleiba 7mo ago
I didn't downvote you, but I've noticed recently a trend on HN that just asking a normal question (possibly to start a discussion) gets downvoted for no apparent reason and without any explanation. Not good etiquette, in my opinion.
- threethirtytwo 7mo ago
  I think it's all the angry people who were wrong about AI. Every week they come on HN and say AI is utter crap and useless, and every week AI becomes more and more part of the developer work flow. I would be pissed off too if I was a hypocrite who was so sure AI was total garbage and was now at the same time needing to use claude on a daily basis. A lot of developers are going through an identity crisis where their skills are becoming more and more useless and they need to attack comments like the above in a desperate but futile attempt to make themselves matter.
yogthos 7mo ago
It's a similar problem in the human context, but I think the reason stuff like workflow agents haven't caught on is because humans don't really like to work this say. Writing a conditional and calling a function keeps you in your flow, but having to jump between an orchestration layer and your code with implementation details breaks that. But LLMs don't have this problem. In fact, they benefit from having all the additional information that's expressed in the graph layer.

How is that different compared to a human dev that would miss bugs?

by NotGMan 7mo ago

How is that different compared to a human dev that would miss bugs?

Grimblewald 7mo ago

The ability to plan long term and anticipate flow on errors.

onion2k 7mo ago
You chosen AI agent can and will plan as far ahead as you tell it to plan. If you tell it to do things in iteration 1 that might block it in iteration 3 then you should have told it more about where you want to go back in iteration 1.
- Grimblewald 7mo ago
  At some point I have to describe what I need with such a level of detail and precision, that if I had chosen to wrote it in my language of interest I'd have had the code I wanted long before i finish writing all the boundry conditions, safe guards, long term pitfalls etc. Thats if the system even respects all of those things, it might just lose track of some instruction at some point or make some bs placeholder and now we're back to bug hunting, only i'm now wading through code that is best described as slop.
  - onion2k 7mo ago
    You're saying that projects need to be waterfall rather than Agile in order to avoid making architecture mistakes you'll regret later. The problem with that is that as you build you learn things, and that changes the plan. Consequently those mistakes are inevitable. What you should do is an approach where you have a high level plan up front, and detailed plans about the specific features as you need them. Mistakes will still happen but you'll be able to see them, and correct them, faster.
    - Grimblewald 7mo ago
      No, I am saying that you are trading what you spend effort on when using LLM's. Do you give up the effort of writing for the effort of review? Weather you should and if you will benefit really depends on your expertise and skill set. If you're a novice, or even intermediate, use AI in a feedback kind of way, see if it can pinpoint and explain problems with your current code and offer feedback/recommendations. Not code, but dot point human language feedback like you'd get from a senior dev. If the AI is writing code that is beyond what you could produce yourself, you have no business trusting the code the AI produces. This is because, as anyone who can produce high level code will tell you, AI is wrong too frequently to blindly trust. You have to engage critically with output. Full auto is a disaster waiting to happen. The problem is, for many, good looking but fundamentally flawed code is indistinguishable from the real deal, and so they simply outsource their ability to critically think to a thing that simply cannot. This is a big problem and the evidence for this claim is littered throughout this comment section.

nomercy400 7mo ago

Yes, this is simply 'technical debt'. They should try to fix technical debt before going to the next round. Of course Claude can probably also do this.

duskdozer 7mo ago

The people using these programs are generating massive amounts of code, and you won't convince me they're actually carefully understanding most of it, if they even read it all. And it bypasses the first verification step where you are actively typing in the code that will be run.

kleiba 7mo ago

I didn't downvote you, but I've noticed recently a trend on HN that just asking a normal question (possibly to start a discussion) gets downvoted for no apparent reason and without any explanation. Not good etiquette, in my opinion.

threethirtytwo 7mo ago
I think it's all the angry people who were wrong about AI. Every week they come on HN and say AI is utter crap and useless, and every week AI becomes more and more part of the developer work flow. I would be pissed off too if I was a hypocrite who was so sure AI was total garbage and was now at the same time needing to use claude on a daily basis. A lot of developers are going through an identity crisis where their skills are becoming more and more useless and they need to attack comments like the above in a desperate but futile attempt to make themselves matter.

yogthos 7mo ago

It's a similar problem in the human context, but I think the reason stuff like workflow agents haven't caught on is because humans don't really like to work this say. Writing a conditional and calling a function keeps you in your flow, but having to jump between an orchestration layer and your code with implementation details breaks that. But LLMs don't have this problem. In fact, they benefit from having all the additional information that's expressed in the graph layer.