3 ms·

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.
    • dilyevsky 6mo ago
      High quality c++ code today looks exactly same as it did six months, hell, six years ago. Innovation doesn’t come from code tricks
      • WorldMaker 6mo ago
        True innovation is doing something new that has never been seen before. Even if you are doing it in a stable language that's just a stable poetry form (rhyme and meter and formatting), the real magic is the content of the poetry, and the real beauty of code is when the poetry reads well to both audiences, the compiler and the next maintainer, on multiple levels, the literal and the metaphorical. LLMs can't reach the metaphorical. LLMs don't know what true beauty is. I will grant you they have gotten great at the literal and the poetry forms. But it is the beauty that elevates things to my quality bar, and makes a difference between "legacy code" and "innovation" to me.
        • dilyevsky 6mo ago
          What you're describing is not innovation in the business sense but some kind of experimental art. Software engineering is not art as the name suggests - it's a craft, even though there's a self-expression component to it.
          • WorldMaker 6mo ago
            I think we have different definitions of what a craft is. My boundary between art and craft is a lot looser, for instance. The way I see it there is craft to the best art and there is art embedded in the best craft. I think you are right that companies seem to ignore both the art and craft of software engineering and long wish the process were a predictable industrial machine much more than an art or a craft. But I will absolutely disagree with you that just because companies desire it to be an industrial process doesn't mean it isn't my job to understand the art of software design and how that influences the crafting of software.
    • thedevilslawyer 6mo ago
  • nyssos 6mo ago
    You're presuming too much about what OP's quality standards are. Can SOTA models outperform the average junior engineer? Yes, obviously. Can they match the best human engineers, if those humans were given all the time and interest in the world? Equally obviously not. I use hundreds of millions of tokens a month, and LLMs have completely transformed the way I work. They're also, frankly, pretty mid programmers.
    • dilyevsky 6mo ago
      most people are around mid by definition. mid is good. a lot of companies pay good money to find mid devs.
      • nyssos 6mo ago
        Yes, and? Something can be both scare and inadequate to a given task. FAANG L5s cost a pretty penny but I wouldn't trust a random one to prove a crypto library correct.
        • dilyevsky 6mo ago
          Number of people who i personally met and would entrust a crypto library to i can count on one hand. You're moving that goalpost at relativistic speeds now.
• dionian 6mo ago
  how many LOC per day are you shipping