4 ms·

In our team's experience, the product of agents is generally The Homer (1). It does work, but it's vastly overengineered. When I personally want tight code, I

In our team's experience, the product of agents is generally The Homer (1). It does work, but it's vastly overengineered. When I personally want tight code, I have to spend a considerable amount of time adjusting it manually: - It needs to be trimmed down. In my experience, at least one agent I use struggles to produce minimalist designs, and it's very frustrating - I need to consider whether there are solutions based on higher-level assumptions, that AIs typically miss - I need to check whether there are off-the-shelf solutions - AIs like to reinvent the wheel IMO, software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same. (1) https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer

eitally 2mo ago
As a business user, the same thing is true for non-code documents. The biggest exertion is reducing the excessive slop down to concise, clear points.
extr 2mo ago
This was more true a few months ago but Fable has improved the situation considerably. Also just remember - minimalist code looks and feels great but customers do not read your code. I have caught myself many times providing "corrections" to abstractions that were already ~fine, just not perfect. The average SWE costs $200/hr. Careful you don't burn $50 worrying about code that will likely be rewritten or can be better abstracted when that's actually needed.
- dieselgate 2mo ago
  > The average SWE costs $200/hr This is a pointless quibble but the hourly rate claim is not true--it's like ~$60 in the USA [0]. Maybe you meant at a specific Org but this is important context when comparing "pricing" between human and AI. [0] https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/software-developer/united-states https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/software-developer/u...
  - copperx 2mo ago
    $15, where we're going.
    - fragmede 2mo ago
      Federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour
  - extr 2mo ago
    How is this not true? Taking a Senior SWE @ ~$200K, even just the base salary cost / 2080 working hours is $100/hr. Fully loaded employer cost + accounting for non-coding time gets you to upper 100s easily. Even for a junior making $100K, I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so. Edit: Fine, "Senior" is not "Average". But naive salary is not the true numerator.
    - anon73044 2mo ago
      Company time != Pay rate, if you're working somewhere that's publicly traded check out "revenue per employee" metrics sometime.
    - pdhborges 2mo ago
      I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so. In many places in Europe it is.
      - Foobar8568 2mo ago
        Western Europe is mostly consultancy, and the rate paid by client is usually higher, and doesn't matter if it's eastern Europe, Portugal or even India.
      - rustystump 2mo ago
        It is. And the quality is on par with any us eng. People here forget that the big comp packages are a minority even in the US. The cost tho is much higher than just salary.
- BobbyJo 2mo ago
  Minimalist code is necessary to keep AI agents working well for longer than a month on a system IME. At a certain point, their own machinations overwhelm them and they both slow down, and make worse and worse decisions.
  - gracehenry45 2mo ago
    [dead]
- j-bos 2mo ago
  > The average SWE costs $200/hr. And this is how I find out I'm woefully underpaid.
  - jacquesm 2mo ago
    Whatever you are making this year as SWE you'll be making less next year if the current trend in improvement of AI coding aids is going to be sustained. Think about it : programmers used to derive a lot of their value from the fact that it was a hard skill to acquire. My kids can now 'vibe code' stuff faster (and better looking) than what I could come up with as the beginnings of a design plan. And then I still need to implement it.
    - alfalfasprout 2mo ago
      There's a massive difference between your kids vibe coding something and an engineer using AI to implement something. If you're unable to discern the difference, that's something to reflect on :)
      - throw-the-towel 2mo ago
        It doesn't matter if GP is able to discern the difference, it matters if your CEO is forced to care about the difference.
        ipaddr 2mo ago
        CEOs will always want someone who knows to implement so we're safe from kids vibe coding their way in but in a short while it becomes AI who knows who is managing less expensive AI.
      - lelanthran 2mo ago
        If he is unable to discern a difference, then a paying customer almost certainly won't. We're entering a market of lemons in software. It's going to be interesting indeed.
  - 2mo ago
- sejje 2mo ago
  Also, you can probably think about it like this: "Will I benefit from this code being minimalist before [date]", where [date] is whenever you think the agent will be good enough to come back and make the corrections you would make today.
  - Terr_ 2mo ago
    I'd caution that some corrections become harder to make over time, rather than easier. A bad architecture now can become much harder to fix once other things have grown up around it. Even as a self-contained unit, you can't step in the same river twice, and on [date] some important details may have seriously faded, both in terms of text that can be mined and also in terms of human "why did we do that" and "what was the reason we did it this way and not that way" etc.
- slopinthebag 2mo ago
  The average SWE makes $400k a year? Are you being serious?
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    Costs, not makes. That includes employer taxes, benefits, offices, travel, training, hardware, any perks.
dieselgate 2mo ago
It took me a few seconds of deliberating if The Homer was a reference to baseball or "The Odyssey" and then realized there was a footnote > software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same. Agreed.
- GoofGarage 2mo ago
  I believe “The Homer” is a reference to Season 2, Episode 15 of The Simpsons, “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” Homer reunites with his long lost brother, who runs car company Powell Motors. Homer is ultimately tasked by his brother with helping to design a car for the “average man” that ultimately bankrupts the company for being wildly overengineered and costing too much ($82,000 in 1991-money). Here’s the car: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer
  - thejazzman 2mo ago
    This monstrosity cost $82,000?! https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=the-simpsons_02_15_490&text=This+monstrosity%0Acost+%2482%2C000%3F&j= https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=the-simpsons_02_15_490&text=Th...
frevib 2mo ago
No surprise, LLM companies optimize for waste. More tokens, and more prompts means more revenue. Reminds of Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan story: deliberately making search worse [1] [1]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-r...
- nomel 2mo ago
  Or, more likely, it's that concise code requires a much deeper, wholistic, understanding that these models just are capable of yet. Same with a junior dev. They don't write long form spaghetti because they're trying to write more LOC. They do it because not doing it is hard, literally above their pay grade. I use LLM every day, but they're still completely awful at architecture. I don't think this clear lack of ability is some conspiracy.
  - lilbigdoot 2mo ago
    Personal anecdote: I spent a few days hacking on my compiler to remove 1k lines of code (about 15% of total code) while preserving behavior I was only able to do that after I had solved multiple related problems in different places and started introducing subtle bugs by accident / had difficulty detecting all edge cases I've noticed whenever I use LLMs they introduce the same kind of thing but at much smaller scales than I would. They often suggest solving the wrong problem when I prompt them to diagnose specific bugs too. Usually opting for a shortcut that introduces its own issues and ironically calling the proper direction "too complex" when it's really not.
  - frevib 2mo ago
    > I don't think this clear lack of ability is some conspiracy. Maybe currently not. But we will never be able to know, as models are undeterministic and benchmarks are kind of scams. When you cannot prove that something gets worse, rest assured companies will to it.
    - nomel 2mo ago
      This requires something other than a free market, and for China to not exist. We're not there yet. There's plenty of competition to prevent this, for now, with AI spending being an incredibly hot issue.
pianopatrick 2mo ago
If software has become a mass-produced commodity then seems to me the software business will become a much more finance focused business You will really have to weigh the cost of making the software against the expected revenue.
- roncesvalles 2mo ago
  Since software is still a winner-takes-all market, the mass-production property of software doesn't really matter. In such markets, what you produce is either worth nothing or worth millions of dollars. For as long as it's the case that well-constructed code (with or without LLM help) is more likely to be in the latter category, the economics of software don't really change. Even before LLMs, you could've commissioned a half-assed clone of any app you wanted from a 3rd world consultancy for a few thousand dollars. LLMs are basically Bangalore-as-API.
  - oblio 2mo ago
    > Since software is still a winner-takes-all market, the mass-production property of software doesn't really matter. Fairly sure software dev was always an iceberg. Most software and most software devs aren't working on horizontal software, but on vertical software, in cost centers. Sales for that kind of software don't scale as much.
    - roncesvalles 2mo ago
      Most vertical software is just horizontal software glued together
      - oblio 2mo ago
        Horizontal open source modules... And making the horizontal modules doesn't employ many people, both because of FOSS and also because you only need so many reusable modules. When we were making brick houses we needed a few brick factories with thousands of people for million of bricklayers.
  - 2mo ago
sublinear 2mo ago
> software production has become a mass-produced commodity For who? The public? The public has never liked buying software at any price. Businesses? Businesses need higher quality software when it's relevant to their core competencies, so they hire people instead. Buying competing SaaS or depending too much on AI is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
redhale 2mo ago
I largely agree, but when this point is brought up I always feel the need to go one step further: For the vast majority of software out there, this quality gap simply doesn't matter. Not everything is big tech, needing internet scale. Most software built by developers at non-tech companies are simple line-of-business apps used by a handful to a few dozen or maybe a few hundred people to do a thing a bit better than the Excel spreadsheet that was used before. And AI has essentially automated the development of this kind of software. Or rather, it has dramatically increased the ability of skilled developers to produce larger amounts of these kinds of systems. Excel hardest hit.
- zobzu 2mo ago
  i don't think people writing this understand how computers work. there is no "Internet scale hard" problem. its reliability, safety, efficiency problems. these problems exist at any scale. ai sucks at it.
  - redhale 2mo ago
    > its reliability, safety, efficiency problems. these problems exist at any scale Respectfully, I disagree. When you have 5 users using an app sandboxed within the corporate firewall that just does some CRUD and basic workflows, these problems you're calling out really just don't matter much. Some do some of the time, but not much. Obviously not all software falls into this category. But so, so much does. Do you know how many thousands of tiny applications are maintained by big all non-big-tech corporations? I've seen many of them up close -- the code is usually complete garbage (seriously, it's bad; and alas, most was written before the age of AI coding agents), and yet, the business continues to operate and use the software.
- myegorov 2mo ago
  > For the vast majority of software out there, this quality gap simply doesn't matter. You don't mean the majority of paid for software can behave non-deterministically? That's the value add of the human in the loop.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
sandworm101 2mo ago
>> In my experience, at least one agent I use struggles to produce minimalist designs, and it's very frustrating Which ones don't? I used to play Wing Commander II. It was 30mb. Today, the software to adjust the colored lights on my keyboard requires literally a thousand times as much memory.

eitally 2mo ago

As a business user, the same thing is true for non-code documents. The biggest exertion is reducing the excessive slop down to concise, clear points.

extr 2mo ago

This was more true a few months ago but Fable has improved the situation considerably. Also just remember - minimalist code looks and feels great but customers do not read your code. I have caught myself many times providing "corrections" to abstractions that were already ~fine, just not perfect. The average SWE costs $200/hr. Careful you don't burn $50 worrying about code that will likely be rewritten or can be better abstracted when that's actually needed.

dieselgate 2mo ago
> The average SWE costs $200/hr This is a pointless quibble but the hourly rate claim is not true--it's like ~$60 in the USA [0]. Maybe you meant at a specific Org but this is important context when comparing "pricing" between human and AI. [0] https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/software-developer/united-states https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/software-developer/u...
- copperx 2mo ago
  $15, where we're going.
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    Federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour
- extr 2mo ago
  How is this not true? Taking a Senior SWE @ ~$200K, even just the base salary cost / 2080 working hours is $100/hr. Fully loaded employer cost + accounting for non-coding time gets you to upper 100s easily. Even for a junior making $100K, I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so. Edit: Fine, "Senior" is not "Average". But naive salary is not the true numerator.
  - anon73044 2mo ago
    Company time != Pay rate, if you're working somewhere that's publicly traded check out "revenue per employee" metrics sometime.
  - pdhborges 2mo ago
    I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so. In many places in Europe it is.
    - Foobar8568 2mo ago
      Western Europe is mostly consultancy, and the rate paid by client is usually higher, and doesn't matter if it's eastern Europe, Portugal or even India.
    - rustystump 2mo ago
      It is. And the quality is on par with any us eng. People here forget that the big comp packages are a minority even in the US. The cost tho is much higher than just salary.
BobbyJo 2mo ago
Minimalist code is necessary to keep AI agents working well for longer than a month on a system IME. At a certain point, their own machinations overwhelm them and they both slow down, and make worse and worse decisions.
- gracehenry45 2mo ago
  [dead]
j-bos 2mo ago
> The average SWE costs $200/hr. And this is how I find out I'm woefully underpaid.
- jacquesm 2mo ago
  Whatever you are making this year as SWE you'll be making less next year if the current trend in improvement of AI coding aids is going to be sustained. Think about it : programmers used to derive a lot of their value from the fact that it was a hard skill to acquire. My kids can now 'vibe code' stuff faster (and better looking) than what I could come up with as the beginnings of a design plan. And then I still need to implement it.
  - alfalfasprout 2mo ago
    There's a massive difference between your kids vibe coding something and an engineer using AI to implement something. If you're unable to discern the difference, that's something to reflect on :)
    - throw-the-towel 2mo ago
      It doesn't matter if GP is able to discern the difference, it matters if your CEO is forced to care about the difference.
      - ipaddr 2mo ago
        CEOs will always want someone who knows to implement so we're safe from kids vibe coding their way in but in a short while it becomes AI who knows who is managing less expensive AI.
    - lelanthran 2mo ago
      If he is unable to discern a difference, then a paying customer almost certainly won't. We're entering a market of lemons in software. It's going to be interesting indeed.
- 2mo ago
sejje 2mo ago
Also, you can probably think about it like this: "Will I benefit from this code being minimalist before [date]", where [date] is whenever you think the agent will be good enough to come back and make the corrections you would make today.
- Terr_ 2mo ago
  I'd caution that some corrections become harder to make over time, rather than easier. A bad architecture now can become much harder to fix once other things have grown up around it. Even as a self-contained unit, you can't step in the same river twice, and on [date] some important details may have seriously faded, both in terms of text that can be mined and also in terms of human "why did we do that" and "what was the reason we did it this way and not that way" etc.
slopinthebag 2mo ago
The average SWE makes $400k a year? Are you being serious?
- fragmede 2mo ago
  Costs, not makes. That includes employer taxes, benefits, offices, travel, training, hardware, any perks.

dieselgate 2mo ago

It took me a few seconds of deliberating if The Homer was a reference to baseball or "The Odyssey" and then realized there was a footnote > software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same. Agreed.

GoofGarage 2mo ago
I believe “The Homer” is a reference to Season 2, Episode 15 of The Simpsons, “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” Homer reunites with his long lost brother, who runs car company Powell Motors. Homer is ultimately tasked by his brother with helping to design a car for the “average man” that ultimately bankrupts the company for being wildly overengineered and costing too much ($82,000 in 1991-money). Here’s the car: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer
- thejazzman 2mo ago
  This monstrosity cost $82,000?! https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=the-simpsons_02_15_490&text=This+monstrosity%0Acost+%2482%2C000%3F&j= https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=the-simpsons_02_15_490&text=Th...

frevib 2mo ago

No surprise, LLM companies optimize for waste. More tokens, and more prompts means more revenue. Reminds of Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan story: deliberately making search worse [1] [1]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-r...

nomel 2mo ago
Or, more likely, it's that concise code requires a much deeper, wholistic, understanding that these models just are capable of yet. Same with a junior dev. They don't write long form spaghetti because they're trying to write more LOC. They do it because not doing it is hard, literally above their pay grade. I use LLM every day, but they're still completely awful at architecture. I don't think this clear lack of ability is some conspiracy.
- lilbigdoot 2mo ago
  Personal anecdote: I spent a few days hacking on my compiler to remove 1k lines of code (about 15% of total code) while preserving behavior I was only able to do that after I had solved multiple related problems in different places and started introducing subtle bugs by accident / had difficulty detecting all edge cases I've noticed whenever I use LLMs they introduce the same kind of thing but at much smaller scales than I would. They often suggest solving the wrong problem when I prompt them to diagnose specific bugs too. Usually opting for a shortcut that introduces its own issues and ironically calling the proper direction "too complex" when it's really not.
- frevib 2mo ago
  > I don't think this clear lack of ability is some conspiracy. Maybe currently not. But we will never be able to know, as models are undeterministic and benchmarks are kind of scams. When you cannot prove that something gets worse, rest assured companies will to it.
  - nomel 2mo ago
    This requires something other than a free market, and for China to not exist. We're not there yet. There's plenty of competition to prevent this, for now, with AI spending being an incredibly hot issue.

pianopatrick 2mo ago

If software has become a mass-produced commodity then seems to me the software business will become a much more finance focused business You will really have to weigh the cost of making the software against the expected revenue.

roncesvalles 2mo ago
Since software is still a winner-takes-all market, the mass-production property of software doesn't really matter. In such markets, what you produce is either worth nothing or worth millions of dollars. For as long as it's the case that well-constructed code (with or without LLM help) is more likely to be in the latter category, the economics of software don't really change. Even before LLMs, you could've commissioned a half-assed clone of any app you wanted from a 3rd world consultancy for a few thousand dollars. LLMs are basically Bangalore-as-API.
- oblio 2mo ago
  > Since software is still a winner-takes-all market, the mass-production property of software doesn't really matter. Fairly sure software dev was always an iceberg. Most software and most software devs aren't working on horizontal software, but on vertical software, in cost centers. Sales for that kind of software don't scale as much.
  - roncesvalles 2mo ago
    Most vertical software is just horizontal software glued together
    - oblio 2mo ago
      Horizontal open source modules... And making the horizontal modules doesn't employ many people, both because of FOSS and also because you only need so many reusable modules. When we were making brick houses we needed a few brick factories with thousands of people for million of bricklayers.
- 2mo ago

sublinear 2mo ago

> software production has become a mass-produced commodity For who? The public? The public has never liked buying software at any price. Businesses? Businesses need higher quality software when it's relevant to their core competencies, so they hire people instead. Buying competing SaaS or depending too much on AI is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

redhale 2mo ago

I largely agree, but when this point is brought up I always feel the need to go one step further: For the vast majority of software out there, this quality gap simply doesn't matter. Not everything is big tech, needing internet scale. Most software built by developers at non-tech companies are simple line-of-business apps used by a handful to a few dozen or maybe a few hundred people to do a thing a bit better than the Excel spreadsheet that was used before. And AI has essentially automated the development of this kind of software. Or rather, it has dramatically increased the ability of skilled developers to produce larger amounts of these kinds of systems. Excel hardest hit.

zobzu 2mo ago
i don't think people writing this understand how computers work. there is no "Internet scale hard" problem. its reliability, safety, efficiency problems. these problems exist at any scale. ai sucks at it.
- redhale 2mo ago
  > its reliability, safety, efficiency problems. these problems exist at any scale Respectfully, I disagree. When you have 5 users using an app sandboxed within the corporate firewall that just does some CRUD and basic workflows, these problems you're calling out really just don't matter much. Some do some of the time, but not much. Obviously not all software falls into this category. But so, so much does. Do you know how many thousands of tiny applications are maintained by big all non-big-tech corporations? I've seen many of them up close -- the code is usually complete garbage (seriously, it's bad; and alas, most was written before the age of AI coding agents), and yet, the business continues to operate and use the software.
myegorov 2mo ago
> For the vast majority of software out there, this quality gap simply doesn't matter. You don't mean the majority of paid for software can behave non-deterministically? That's the value add of the human in the loop.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

sandworm101 2mo ago

>> In my experience, at least one agent I use struggles to produce minimalist designs, and it's very frustrating Which ones don't? I used to play Wing Commander II. It was 30mb. Today, the software to adjust the colored lights on my keyboard requires literally a thousand times as much memory.