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Comment by qudat | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell as a heavy coding agent user: you don’t need to know any of this and that’s a testament to how good code agent TUIs have become. All I do to be productive with a coding agent is tell it to break a problem down into tasks, store it inside beads, and then make sure each step is approved by me. I also add in a TDD requirement where it needs to build tests that fail then eventually pass.

Everything else I’ve used has been over engineered and far less impactful. What I just said above is already what many of us do anyway.

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This sounds like my complete and utter nightmare. No art or finesse in building the thing - only an exercise in torturing language to someone who at a fundamental level doesn't understand a thing.

Nothing stopping you from hand sculpting software like we did in the before times.

Mass production however won’t stop, it’s barely started literally a couple months ago and it’s the slowest and worst it’ll ever be.

I'm not viewing AI tooling as an extinction of the art of programming, only illuminating how telling an AI how to create programs isn't in the same universe as programming, where the technical skill to do such a thing is on par with punching in how long my microwave should nuke my popcorn.

This isn't my experience. It's more like discussing with another skilled developer on my team how we should code the solution, what APIs we should use, what techniques, what algorithms. Firing ideas back and forth until we settle on a reasonable plan of attack. That plan usually consists of a mix of high level ideas and chunks of example code.

I keep hearing "it's the slowest and worst it'll ever be" as though software ability and performance only ever increase and yet mass produced software is slower and enshittier than it was 10-15 years ago and we're all complaining about it. And you can't say "but it does so much more" because I never asked for 90% of the "more" and just want to turn most of it off.

I’m also not convinced that any of these models are going to stick around at the same level once the financial house of cards they’re built on comes tumbling down. I wonder what the true cost of running something like Claude opus is, it’s probably unjustifiably expensive. If that happens, I don’t think this stuff is going to completely disappear but at some point companies are going to have to decide which parts are valuable and jettison the rest.

It definitely feels like we're living in the golden time when all the LLMs are getting massively subsidized. You could just tab between all the free accounts all day right now and still get some amazing code results without paying a dime.

I can think of a few things that could happen to sink "it's the slowest and worst it'll ever be". Even ignoring things that could happen, I think in general we're hitting a ceiling with LLMs. All the annoyances and bugs and frankly incompetence with the current models are not going away soon, despite $tn of investments. At this point it is now just about propping up this bubble so the USA doesn't have another big recession.

I don’t really understand how you got that from my post. I can and do drop in to refactor or work on the interesting parts of a project. At every checkpoint where I require a review I can and do make medications by hand.

Are you complaining about code formatters or auto fix linters? What about codegen based on APIs specs? A code agent can do all of those and more. It can do all the boring parts while I get to focus on the interesting bits. It’s great.

Here’s another fantastic use case: have an agent gen the code, think about its prototype, delete, and then rewrite it. I did that on a project with huge success: https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx

Not really at all like this, more like being a tech lead for a team of savants who simultaneously are great at parts of software engineering, and limited at others. Though that latter category is slimmer than a year ago…

The point is, you can get lots of quality work out of this team if you learn to manage them well.

If that sounds like a “complete and utter nightmare”, then don’t use AI. Hopefully you can keep up without it in the long run.

I predict by the end of next year we will have our AIs write TPS reports.

Beads?

https://github.com/steveyegge/beads

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