[maccard]

Does it?

I use AI as a smart auto complete - I’ve tried multiple tools on multiple models and I still _regularlt_ have it dump absolute nonsense into my editor - in thr best case it’s gone on a tangent, but in the most common case it’s assumed something (often times directly contradicting what I’ve asked it to do), gone with it, and lost the plot along the way. Of course when I correct it it says “you’re right, X doesn’t exist so we need to do X”…

Has it made me faster? Yes. Had it changed engineering - not even close. There’s absolutely no world where I would trust what I’ve seen out of these tools to run in the real world even with supervision.

[faxmeyourcode]

Unfortunately this is a skill issue. And it's a totally different skill than reading and writing code, building solid systems, and general software engineering at large. That is annoying, but where we're currently at.

Assume you're writing code manually, and you personally make a mistake. It's often worthwhile to create a mechanism that prevents that class of mistake from cropping up again. Adding better LSP or refactoring support to your editor, better syntax highlighting, better type checking, etc.

That same exact game of whack a mole now has to be done for you and whatever agent you're building with. Some questions to ask: What caused the hallucination? Did you have the agent lay out its plan before it writes any code? Ask you questions and iterate on a spec before implementation? Have you given it all of the necessary tools, test harnesses, and context it needs to complete a request that you've made to it? How do you automate this so that it's impossible for these pieces to be missing for the next request? Are you using the right model for the task at hand?

[geitir]

When you have that hair raising “am I crazy why are people touting ai” feeling, it’s good to look at their profile. Oftentimes they’re caught up in some ai play. Also it’s good to remember yc has heavy investment in gen ai so this site is heavily biased

[bonesss]

Context is king, too: in greenfield startups where you care little about maintenance and can accept redundant front end frameworks and backend languages? I believe agent swarms can poop out a lot lot lot of code relatively quick… Copy and paste is faster though. Downloading a repo is very quick.

In startups I’ve competed against companies with 10x and 100x the resources and manpower on the same systems we were building. The amount of code they theoretically could push wasn’t helping them, they were locked to the code they actually had shipped and were in a downwards hiring spiral because of it.

[faxmeyourcode]

I use claude exclusively at my day job with legacy codebases. I'm not using swarms or fancy multi-agent setups. Just sticking to plan mode, giving enough context, and iterating on a spec before starting the actual build.

I'm also not building webapps. I work in data engineering on a large legacy airflow project, internal python libraries, infrastructure with terraform, etc.

[maccard]

Here’s the thing - an awful lot of it doesn’t even compile/run, never mind do the right thing. My most recent example was asking it to use terraform to run an azure container app with an environment variable in an existing app environment. It repeatedly made up where the environment block goes, and and cursor kept putting the actual resource in random places in the file.