4 ms·

The thing is the code quality is still ultimately up to you Nothing stopping you from iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you

The thing is the code quality is still ultimately up to you Nothing stopping you from iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write

cyanydeez 6mo ago
Sure, but then it's not really saving you time is it.
- ex-aws-dude 6mo ago
  IMO it still does save time generally but it’s not as much of a huge gain if you’re doing this. I will admit there are occasional times after iterating so much I’m not sure if I’ve even saved time because going from “it works” to “it’s up to quality” takes so long
  - habinero 6mo ago
    I've run a few experiments where I give it well-defined small side projects where I have a good idea of what I would do and how long it would take, and I time the process from start to finish. So far, it's been pretty underwhelming--on par or slower, and it's definitely more frustrating lol. Honestly, the only killer feature I found so far is overcoming ADHD activation energy lol. Getting annoyed with the idiot robot screwing up the Terraform migration is apparently a good way to get me to finish a Terraform migration.
- komat 6mo ago
  It still is if agent brings it up to quality fast . And yea usually does for me
  - deadbabe 6mo ago
    I mean you have to compare apples to apples. If you are coding by hand like the old days you are probably not literally writing everything from scratch anyway, you are copy pasting a bunch of shit off google and stackoverflow or installing open source libraries.
    - a1o 6mo ago
      I also reuse a lot of my own code. Either from libraries I built or just directly copy pasting (like boilerplate code for setting up the basics of something in my style).
- 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
  Comment deleted because it was backwards
  - brightball 6mo ago
    But you’d have that coding it yourself…
    - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
      Actually ignore my comment I misunderstood the premise. I meant not vibe coding is the way to save time with production issues. Not the other way around!
- hibikir 6mo ago
  In my experience, it sure saves time. a lot of quality has significant mechanical components LLMs do great. Hey, this series of 300 functional tests are reusing the same few patterns without helper methods clarifying intent. Give me an overview of possible meaningful methods that would simplify the duplication. Ok, 2, 4 and 5 are good, but rename 2 to X, and change the order of parameters in 5. Implement across the tests, and make sure it all passes. Still very significant savings over all that rather mechanical work. It's ultimately cheaper than doing a code review, and it's faster, because there's less need to manage the emotional state of the person whose code is being reviewed. Maybe I am a slow developer or something, but I am getting a lot of quality changes like that done that before I'd not have, solely because of time spent. And not increasing the quality just causes problems anyway. Given the same quality, more changes mean more outages than before, just by probability. Increasing rate of change demands a similar increase in quality if you don't want your production support costs to go up. So spending at least a bit of time on quality, letting the LLM do the nagging little things that before you didn't do beause they they took too long and were not a core part of quarterly goals is basically mandatory.
- sibeliuss 6mo ago
  It saves so much time! Think of the best find and replace and autocomplete and macro and every other possible super tool you use and roll everything into one. The design phase of any significant feature pales in comparison to all of the (now fully automated) tasks that you can just hand off to the agent to do nearly instantly and perfectly.
gerdesj 6mo ago
"... iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write" I don't want my code quality, I want AGI code quality - that's what I was promised and jetpacks and flying cars too!
- larsfaye 6mo ago
  Yeah, I can't help but chuckle when people say "Well, humans make mistakes, too". That's what we're spending 7+ TRILLION dollars, destroying ecosystems to build datacenters, and ruining society's social contract on truth and employment for? To build something that produces the average quality of a human, all while making the same types of mistakes along the way? Sounds like a shit deal, really.
kelnos 6mo ago
IME, it's faster and less frustrating to just write the code myself, if the goal is to get code to my quality standards.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway894345 6mo ago
  TL;DR — there’s a whole lot of craft in how you use agents I think that’s mostly true, but also I think there is some skill to using agents well. Specifically, work with agents to get a really good product requirements document, then task it out into very narrow user stories / vertical slices (this takes some iterating—the AI really seems to want to think in horizontal layers today), then maybe walk through the code interfaces to be super sure you are aligned. At each step, I make the agent interrogate me thoroughly with every question it can think of, and even if we stop now we will have a system design and tickets that are much higher quality than me thinking alone. I could hand those off to anyone to implement, but I think having an agent TDD their way through the code is the sweet spot. Whenever the agent is doing something I don’t like (e.g., some coding style thing), I pause and have another agent help me write a style guide that agents must read. This slows me down at first but I think it will pay off in time.
- dilyevsky 6mo ago
  Respectfully, unless someone is really really bad at articulating what the quality standards are or works with a very niche stack that is definitely not the case anymore with SOTA models
  - WorldMaker 6mo ago
    Respectfully, the current models are all trained on everyone else's legacy code as of roughly six months ago and largely always will be. If I'm doing my job right an LLM cannot meet my personal quality bar on its own because I will always need innovation and excellence they will never see and thus cannot deliver. I also think that training these tools on my personal quality bar is more work than just writing it myself.
bigstrat2003 6mo ago
Nothing is stopping you... but that's slower than just writing it yourself to begin with. AI productivity gains are a myth.
sibeliuss 6mo ago
This is precisely why these types of articles don't make any sense to me, and strike me as case studies on human laziness. If you want good output, you'll review the output and iterate. If you want good foundations, you'll write them, and then later those foundations will prevent, to a very great degree, bad code from getting written by the LLM. These articles frustrate me greatly. That said, the author's point about token cost is real, and a risk.
leptons 6mo ago
>Nothing stopping you from iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write Yeah, but in my experience, it takes the same amount of time or longer to cajole the AI to get it there. I'd rather write it myself and know how it works than insert an LLM as the middleman, especially when it isn't really proving to be any faster.

The thing is the code quality is still ultimately up to you Nothing stopping you from iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write

cyanydeez 6mo ago

Sure, but then it's not really saving you time is it.

ex-aws-dude 6mo ago
IMO it still does save time generally but it’s not as much of a huge gain if you’re doing this. I will admit there are occasional times after iterating so much I’m not sure if I’ve even saved time because going from “it works” to “it’s up to quality” takes so long
- habinero 6mo ago
  I've run a few experiments where I give it well-defined small side projects where I have a good idea of what I would do and how long it would take, and I time the process from start to finish. So far, it's been pretty underwhelming--on par or slower, and it's definitely more frustrating lol. Honestly, the only killer feature I found so far is overcoming ADHD activation energy lol. Getting annoyed with the idiot robot screwing up the Terraform migration is apparently a good way to get me to finish a Terraform migration.
komat 6mo ago
It still is if agent brings it up to quality fast . And yea usually does for me
- deadbabe 6mo ago
  I mean you have to compare apples to apples. If you are coding by hand like the old days you are probably not literally writing everything from scratch anyway, you are copy pasting a bunch of shit off google and stackoverflow or installing open source libraries.
  - a1o 6mo ago
    I also reuse a lot of my own code. Either from libraries I built or just directly copy pasting (like boilerplate code for setting up the basics of something in my style).
2ndorderthought 6mo ago
Comment deleted because it was backwards
- brightball 6mo ago
  But you’d have that coding it yourself…
  - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
    Actually ignore my comment I misunderstood the premise. I meant not vibe coding is the way to save time with production issues. Not the other way around!
hibikir 6mo ago
In my experience, it sure saves time. a lot of quality has significant mechanical components LLMs do great. Hey, this series of 300 functional tests are reusing the same few patterns without helper methods clarifying intent. Give me an overview of possible meaningful methods that would simplify the duplication. Ok, 2, 4 and 5 are good, but rename 2 to X, and change the order of parameters in 5. Implement across the tests, and make sure it all passes. Still very significant savings over all that rather mechanical work. It's ultimately cheaper than doing a code review, and it's faster, because there's less need to manage the emotional state of the person whose code is being reviewed. Maybe I am a slow developer or something, but I am getting a lot of quality changes like that done that before I'd not have, solely because of time spent. And not increasing the quality just causes problems anyway. Given the same quality, more changes mean more outages than before, just by probability. Increasing rate of change demands a similar increase in quality if you don't want your production support costs to go up. So spending at least a bit of time on quality, letting the LLM do the nagging little things that before you didn't do beause they they took too long and were not a core part of quarterly goals is basically mandatory.
sibeliuss 6mo ago
It saves so much time! Think of the best find and replace and autocomplete and macro and every other possible super tool you use and roll everything into one. The design phase of any significant feature pales in comparison to all of the (now fully automated) tasks that you can just hand off to the agent to do nearly instantly and perfectly.

gerdesj 6mo ago

"... iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write" I don't want my code quality, I want AGI code quality - that's what I was promised and jetpacks and flying cars too!

larsfaye 6mo ago
Yeah, I can't help but chuckle when people say "Well, humans make mistakes, too". That's what we're spending 7+ TRILLION dollars, destroying ecosystems to build datacenters, and ruining society's social contract on truth and employment for? To build something that produces the average quality of a human, all while making the same types of mistakes along the way? Sounds like a shit deal, really.

kelnos 6mo ago

IME, it's faster and less frustrating to just write the code myself, if the goal is to get code to my quality standards.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
throwaway894345 6mo ago
TL;DR — there’s a whole lot of craft in how you use agents I think that’s mostly true, but also I think there is some skill to using agents well. Specifically, work with agents to get a really good product requirements document, then task it out into very narrow user stories / vertical slices (this takes some iterating—the AI really seems to want to think in horizontal layers today), then maybe walk through the code interfaces to be super sure you are aligned. At each step, I make the agent interrogate me thoroughly with every question it can think of, and even if we stop now we will have a system design and tickets that are much higher quality than me thinking alone. I could hand those off to anyone to implement, but I think having an agent TDD their way through the code is the sweet spot. Whenever the agent is doing something I don’t like (e.g., some coding style thing), I pause and have another agent help me write a style guide that agents must read. This slows me down at first but I think it will pay off in time.
dilyevsky 6mo ago
Respectfully, unless someone is really really bad at articulating what the quality standards are or works with a very niche stack that is definitely not the case anymore with SOTA models
- WorldMaker 6mo ago
  Respectfully, the current models are all trained on everyone else's legacy code as of roughly six months ago and largely always will be. If I'm doing my job right an LLM cannot meet my personal quality bar on its own because I will always need innovation and excellence they will never see and thus cannot deliver. I also think that training these tools on my personal quality bar is more work than just writing it myself.

bigstrat2003 6mo ago

Nothing is stopping you... but that's slower than just writing it yourself to begin with. AI productivity gains are a myth.

sibeliuss 6mo ago

This is precisely why these types of articles don't make any sense to me, and strike me as case studies on human laziness. If you want good output, you'll review the output and iterate. If you want good foundations, you'll write them, and then later those foundations will prevent, to a very great degree, bad code from getting written by the LLM. These articles frustrate me greatly. That said, the author's point about token cost is real, and a risk.

leptons 6mo ago

>Nothing stopping you from iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write Yeah, but in my experience, it takes the same amount of time or longer to cajole the AI to get it there. I'd rather write it myself and know how it works than insert an LLM as the middleman, especially when it isn't really proving to be any faster.