Hacker News Reader

Comment by fkyoureadthedoc | Hacker News Reader

Bad/dumb developers don't get much of a boost in my experience working with a plethora of shitty contractors. Good developers aren't getting a 30x boost I don't think, but they are getting more out of the tooling than bad developers.

The bottleneck is still finding good developers, even with the current generation of AI tooling in play.

View on HN

It was when I started using Github Copilot in "Agent Mode" that my LLM productivity gains went from like 5x to 30x. People who are just using a chatbot get like 5x gains. People who use "Agent Mode" to write up a description of a new feature that would take several days by a human, but get it done in one click by an Agent, are getting 30x or more.

The amount of pushback I got on this thread tells me most devs simply haven't started using actual Agents yet.

I’ve tried using agents. LLMs just can’t reliably accomplish the tasks that I have to do. They just get shit wrong and hallucinate a ton. If I don’t break the task down into tiny chunks then they go off the rails.

This can definitely happen, because the context windows even in a great Agent can become flooded. I often do prompts like "Add a row of buttons at the top right named 'copy', 'cut', and 'paste'", and let the Agent do that, before I implement each button, for example.

The rule of thumb I've learned is to give an Agent the smallest possible task at a time, so there's zero ambiguity in the prompt, and context window is kept small.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com