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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

Every bit of code is more context getting soaked up in future agent runs. More context used = worse output. More tests need to be written, then fixed, using up more compute, time and context without adding value compared to a more thoughtful, efficient implementation.

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> using up more compute, time and context

LLM compute is getting cheaper, so one can re-run the coding agent until it produces the desired result.

> without adding value compared to a more thoughtful, efficient implementation

Thoughtful implementations require thoughtful developers, and thoughtful developers cost more money that dumb GPUs.

It's not just the GPUs that I was referring to, but also the time spent in test runners locally and in CI. There's also the possible runtime cost of extraneous abstractions, but that's beside the point I was getting at.

Thoughtful developers do take money, but so too does shitty code that reaches a point LLMs struggle to maintain. Having both- with the thoughtful developers in charge- is better than just throwing more LLMs at it and hoping for the best.

You can't make these argument against the position that all these problems will be solved. Any problem you point to, someone would argue that an LLM can solve. Expensive compute? costs could get 1000x cheaper. Longer context gets worse output? Newer models would solve that. Ever increasing massive codebase? We'll get a 1B or a 1T context window. Time spent in test runners? parallelize, or selectively select tests, or even better; ask the LLM to optimize the tests or develop a 100x faster chips. Runtime cost of extraneous abstractions? Ask the LLM to keep functionality and focus on performance.

If you seriously believe we have "solved coding" or achieved AGI in coding, what is not possible? Any argument you can come up with will be easily dismissed with "we'll just ask the AGI to solve that problem".

The difference is the first post I replied to used present tense. None of the magic wand thinking applies to the reality of today.

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