4 ms·

I suspect that when it comes to hard complex software products, you’re better off ignoring agents and doing “trad coding”. What you lose in short term speed you

I suspect that when it comes to hard complex software products, you’re better off ignoring agents and doing “trad coding”. What you lose in short term speed you gain in manageable complex codebases. If you have a 500k line codebase and even > 50% is written by agents, you are in a world of pain that won’t justify the costs longer term. Now of course, there are products that just involve lots of code but are not actually complex. This is generally the project with like hundreds or thousands of features but most of the features are separate and don’t actually interact in complex ways. Think a task management app with hundreds of features like calendar, email integration etc. there I think agents gives you more bang for the buck. Just my thought, using agents at work.

SOLAR_FIELDS 2mo ago
> if you have a 500k line codebase and even > 50% is written by agents, you are in a world of pain that won’t justify the costs longer term A bold claim to make with little to no supporting evidence
- delusional 2mo ago
  We are 7 years into a cycle of people baselessly claiming that "AI" will soon develop superhuman abilities and might just take over the world, before killing us all. I don't think there's any way to take part in this discourse without making somewhat unsupported claims.
  - zaphirplane 2mo ago
    We haven’t had LLM agents for 7 years
    - delusional 2mo ago
      They claimed these problems LONG before agents were the new thing. To my eye it started with the bullshit around GPT-2, and that was in 2019, 7 years ago.
lazarie 2mo ago
I work on and maintain a 900k+ LoC codebase with mixed languages, runtimes, deployment models, cloud and airgapped ops and it's 99% written by AI. The difference I see the most between our approach and others is that we see the end-user product as an output of our context engineering internal machine, we focus on building that machine and we measure the output like madmen across all and any qualitative software metrics and signals (traces,collectors,otel,snapshots,profilers,custom debuggers,videos and more). For any change we do, less than 5% of wall time is an AI doing reasoning or coding, 95% is running the verification deterministically. Of that 5%, about 90% is spent on non-feature aligned code. Velocity and quality is through the roof, "10x" would be a regression at this point, the bottleneck is only figuring out what is relevant/good to deliver, the implementation is the output of the machine.
- ianmarcinkowski 2mo ago
  I'm totally willing to believe that new orders of magnitude of software complexity are going to be possible with this kind of engineering. And also, my company brings in a lot of revenue off of 200k lines of code. My old startup brought in millions of revenue on ... very little code tbh. Have you ever listened to a politician talk for an hour and you can't remember what they talked about? If some VC wanted to fund my crazy ideas for building personalized private versions of the internet because people are sick of the nightmare, I would vibe code the hell out of that; but at my current job I have existing customers to keep happy and make sure their financial data doesn't get lost or modified.
- sashank_1509 2mo ago
  What exactly are you building? Does it need 1M lines of code, or is it 10X the needed code already. SQLite + tests is around 1.5M lines of code, somehow I strongly doubt you’re building anything as complex as SQLite.

SOLAR_FIELDS 2mo ago

> if you have a 500k line codebase and even > 50% is written by agents, you are in a world of pain that won’t justify the costs longer term A bold claim to make with little to no supporting evidence

delusional 2mo ago
We are 7 years into a cycle of people baselessly claiming that "AI" will soon develop superhuman abilities and might just take over the world, before killing us all. I don't think there's any way to take part in this discourse without making somewhat unsupported claims.
- zaphirplane 2mo ago
  We haven’t had LLM agents for 7 years
  - delusional 2mo ago
    They claimed these problems LONG before agents were the new thing. To my eye it started with the bullshit around GPT-2, and that was in 2019, 7 years ago.

lazarie 2mo ago

I work on and maintain a 900k+ LoC codebase with mixed languages, runtimes, deployment models, cloud and airgapped ops and it's 99% written by AI. The difference I see the most between our approach and others is that we see the end-user product as an output of our context engineering internal machine, we focus on building that machine and we measure the output like madmen across all and any qualitative software metrics and signals (traces,collectors,otel,snapshots,profilers,custom debuggers,videos and more). For any change we do, less than 5% of wall time is an AI doing reasoning or coding, 95% is running the verification deterministically. Of that 5%, about 90% is spent on non-feature aligned code. Velocity and quality is through the roof, "10x" would be a regression at this point, the bottleneck is only figuring out what is relevant/good to deliver, the implementation is the output of the machine.

ianmarcinkowski 2mo ago
I'm totally willing to believe that new orders of magnitude of software complexity are going to be possible with this kind of engineering. And also, my company brings in a lot of revenue off of 200k lines of code. My old startup brought in millions of revenue on ... very little code tbh. Have you ever listened to a politician talk for an hour and you can't remember what they talked about? If some VC wanted to fund my crazy ideas for building personalized private versions of the internet because people are sick of the nightmare, I would vibe code the hell out of that; but at my current job I have existing customers to keep happy and make sure their financial data doesn't get lost or modified.
sashank_1509 2mo ago
What exactly are you building? Does it need 1M lines of code, or is it 10X the needed code already. SQLite + tests is around 1.5M lines of code, somehow I strongly doubt you’re building anything as complex as SQLite.