Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

lostnfound8778

> The bigger cost was the typing. Every time I wanted to build something, I could see the code in my head. I just couldn’t type it out fast enough. Facts. For me the bigger the gap between what i saw in my head and the speed with which my fingers could physically make it a reality the more stress i would feel and some marathon coding sessions would end w my back all messed up just from the tension

0xbadcafebee

I also haven't written more than a couple lines of code in months, but I definitely do read the code. You have to, or at least provide lots of Claude Rules to help steer it. AI has too many bad coding practices by default. But you don't need to modify lines of code by hand, you can just tell it what to fix. I'm predicting a Docker for AI Coding. There really is a ton of stuff you need to set up to do AI coding/vibe coding in a way that's safe, has good results, and is fast. You don't just need a dev environment, you need a whole SDLC; codified good engineering decisions, test framework, credential management, an interactive UI and notifications, guardrails, a "waterfall" of progressive design/build/test, context management, and much more. It's too much for people to put together themselves without tons of time and experimentation. Same as containers, which is why Docker came about: to let an end user do complex things in an easy way. AI coding is like a self-driving car. Making the car move is easy; making it get you to the destination you want safely is very hard.

gonzalohm

I don't understand people that say "I no longer code" as a good thing. I think it's safe to assume that if you studied computer science or similar you like to code. If not, why did you even study that? To me it just feels like you want to be a manager not an engineer This is like if a plumber said. I no longer do any construction, I just tell people what to do. Then you probably aren't a builder anymore, you are a foreman or a project manager. I think your job as an engineer is to know the codebase and how it was engineered

thisisauserid

And before LLMs he would have slapped together a twenty-line bash script and a cron job over lunch, and spent six months working on something else.

tom_

The writing style really seems to rub off onto people after a while, eh.

hkchad

I've been a software dev for 25 years. In the past year I've hand written maybe 10 lines of code. For the first 2-3 months i would read it, then I figured out how to really use AI/code gen and the amount created was more than I could read. I can work on 2-3 projects at once, or 2-3 parts of a larger project at once. More than that I can't keep task switching. The speed and complexity of what I'm able to create is 10x doing it by hand. In the hands of someone that understands system design it's a great tool, but still need fundamentals. I've seen junior's build stuff that would never deploy and would crash with a handful of users.

joshuablais

ai;dr Can we stop posting obviously slop articles? If you can't make the effort to write the article, I'm not going to make the effort to read it.

iamflimflam1

Writing code with LLMs takes discipline and is difficult. You need to learn how to do it and how to get the best from it. Software engineering is dead, long live software engineering!

phildenhoff

Unfortunate to see an otherwise-good article padded by AI-isms ("But here’s the twist: that search I described earlier was never sent to botd. All the history was in SQLite, so I pointed another agent at it and got the analysis anyway. The tool died; the data didn’t.", amongst other examples). Maisem Ali writes about how they have not stopped engineering despite handing production of code over to AI. I think that's an interesting perspective for a few reasons, but most of all, I'm not sure I agree. First, we see a prime example of how that can blow up. "botd died this month. It crumbled under its own weight." It's hard to imagine how an agent harness (or is it an overlay on top of other harnesses?) could crumble under its own weight from sheer technical complexity. What makes a tool like this "crumble"? If properly architected, it seems that any outside change could be adaptable. Failing tests could be fixed. This AI coding evolution has given us the ability to spin up prototypes we don't understand the inner workings of, but I believe for anything of value (and, I would argue, botd appeared to have value to Maisem) we should at the very least understand and influence the architecture and engineering of what we're building. If Maisem had done that for botd, it would not and _could not_ have "crumbled under its own weight". Whatever outside influence required change within botd would have been manageable. Second, the off-loading of the production of this article indicates to me a lack of respect (with no offence to Maisem, because this is what much of the industry is doing today) for the value in thinking through the writing process. There's a lot that I've learned personally about software I worked on that only came to me through trying to write explainers. Taking a step back from the software we build and looking at it from a birds-eye view, to share how it is constructed or how to use it, helps develop our understanding. Maisem's article is already very good, and I hope that is demonstrative of their own writing! I would read more! But I want to read words written by a person for other people. AI can help edit, it can help us build ideas, but in code and in our written word, AI should not be _the author_.

ryeats

Don't bother with complexity metrics just use claude code to work on a code base with high coupling and low cohesion.

miltonlost

> There is no one answer to agentic engineering. Everyone works differently; every model is good at different things. The key here is reps: do a lot, ask a lot, throw away a lot. You’ll learn what works for you. That all reads to me like: The key here is: "Burn tokens as money in a bonfire, pray you typed in the right magic spell (prompt) and the ingredients (context) in the potion were right, toss away the failed elixir of life". Instead of writing code and refactoring yourself and gaining an understanding, you're hoping that a slot machine will get luckily get the statistics right to put up code that you already need to read again. > It’s the same loop that taught me to code, moved up a level: write, run, fail, fix. I used to iterate on code. Now I iterate on prompts, designs, whole features. A rewrite that used to cost a week costs a conversation. And also costs you skills atrophy and however much tokens will be. Not to mention the negative externalities of using LLMs (massive increase of fraud, of disinformation, of rocketing prices in memory and in turn all electronics, massive use of energy that consumers have to also then pay extra for, environmental and noise cost of using on-site turbines, local destruction of water resources for the local community).

qsera

>AI agents are just software, after all. I wasn’t going to understand them by reading prompt guides. I had to use them for real work, see where they failed, change the prompts, tools, or environment, and try again. It seems that all this knowledge would be useless with a model update...Good for the AI companies though. More tokens as users like this come upto speed with the new models, which they now are totally dependent on... Because, if you didn't like writing code, and is now used to agents writing code, good luck going back to writing code by hand...

greenowl

I committed to the fully agentic approach for a while. No code by hand! Setting aside the "capability" of the tools, I knew it was the wrong direction after a couple months or so in. I specifically remember during a large feature implementation running out of tokens for my 5 hour window or whatever, and I just couldn't continue on my own. Mostly due to laziness (I'll just wait till tomorrow when my limit resets!), but I also picked up on my first big whiff of skill rot / atrophy brewing, and that made feel uncomfortable. I just don't see this fully agentic approach going well long term. Talk about the ultimate dependency!! If the lights are "turned off" for whatever reason - outages, cost increases, or the agentic velocity finally reaches a complexity tipping point and you've lost control and understanding of your system to the point the agents are making things worse, whatever it is - do you really expect to be able to turn back the clock and step in to code at the productivity level and output you used to when you actually... wrote code?

jplusequalt

The author also has agents write their blog posts.

redlewel

How do people read these types of post with this AI flair, I couldn't read more than a couple sentences

rich_sasha

I feel a really odd dissonance with all these accounts. I have access to top models via Cursor at work. Every time I think to myself, here’s a tedious but well defined task, with clear success criteria, where you can achieve a lot with persistent iterations. I’ll give it to Claude to do. First, it takes me ages to describe the task properly. All these clear success criteria, well, instead of writing code from a clear spec in my head, I’m writing tons of prose, and trying to make it unambiguous. I’m programming in English++. But then, one time in 5, it produces something that kinda works. Maybe not perfect but good enough. Two times out of 5 it kind of sort of looks alright, but actually ignores 80% of the spec, or pays it minimal lip service in the comments. And sometimes, maybe a bit less than 2/5, it just completely diverges into total shit. Starts writing scripts that load the ast of the main script and pickle it then serialise to base64 for no good reason. Encode some stuff in strings then check ord(string[i]) repeatedly for string comparison. Eventually runs out of context and develops the LLM equivalent of severe dementia. I truly cannot reconcile my experience with people who seem to say “hey computer write this” and it’s a good use of their time.

lp4v4n

I honestly didn't read the whole article, but I think that this kind of experiment leads to a misleading way of seeing things. I met a few architects/team leaders who wouldn't write almost any code and just technically oversaw things before LLMs got popular, obviously they were very experiencied. What you have to ask yourself is whether you could oversee a swarm of bots(or people) if you didn't have any coding experience in the first place. A lot of HN users seem to be, in my opinion, too dismissive about the complexity of creating software. It's true that we don't have to develop in assembly anymore to be a good developer and with time the general level of the entry abstractions that we deal with rises, but, in my opinion once again, it will never change the fact that you need a high number of hours of exposure to something in order to be truly competent to a professional level.

ChrisLTD

> AI agents are just software, after all. I wasn’t going to understand them by reading prompt guides. I had to use them for real work, see where they failed, change the prompts, tools, or environment, and try again. AI agents are just software, so the only way to understand them is trial and error?

DarmokTanagra

slop post about slop code

springtimesun

I’m m just starting to get results on a local/cloud agent pipeline I’ve been building. I don’t think I will ever code again. Plan, review, read, architect, test, yes. Code though simply doesn’t make sense when I’m getting these results at this velocity. Every few months it feels like I have moved further up the chain. Now I don’t even look at a PR until it’s been coded and gone through at least 2 AI reviews (always different families). Code is truly cheap. I can have the pipeline produce an entire feature as a thought experiment just to see if the shape is the right fit for the codebase. People like to throw the slop term around a lot. It feels like the opposite of slop through. I can have things written and rewritten as many times as it takes until I’m happy with them. The weakness I see in this is there at the end. The agents never want to throw things away. They just want to keep adding and adding. I think this is my real value in the chain. That intuition built up over years that says this isn’t right yet or that little tingle in your brain that you’ve laid a landline that you are going to step on in 6 months.