[charcircuit]

>I’m upset now when people are making claims that agents are so useful, but can’t tell me when or why or how they’re useful beyond vibes about feeling more productive (vibes that have been refuted by real science contrasting objective measure of productivity vs. subjective reports), or examples of having produced a lot of plausible output.

This position is untenable when from my perspective everyone writes all of their code using agents. I had to double check the year on the post to see if this was actually posted in 2026.

[mekael]

Most people I know don't write any code with agents, 90ish percent is still written by hand. I'm personally still trying to figure out where to fit them into my workflow: there's not much boilerplate to write as well known frameworks and libraries had already taken care of the heavy lifting, templates for major project types cut down on the initial startup overhead, and all of the project planning is done upfront with business partners.

Despite my ethical issues with AI, I am using it for a handful of personal projects so I am at least keeping up with what the frontier models are doing and I'm quite impressed with them for doing reverse engineering (they need a lot of hand holding, but I've been able to knock out months of trial and error pretty quickly).

That being said, I'm still perplexed when people state they're getting huge gains from them in terms of knocking out boilerplate, or helping them plan out the project. I was under the impression that the former was a solved problem, and the latter was a requirement of being a decent engineer.

[charcircuit]

>the former was a solved problem

It want solved. There was some generic boilerplate that was added to IDEs but it wouldn't be project specific. It wasn't able to look at patterns within your own codebase and repeat them.

>and the latter was a requirement of being a decent engineer.

Most software projects are too big to fit in one engineers head. Having AI be able to research what the relevant code is, how it works, what race conditions exist, what pitfalls or other things you may run into saves a lot of time in regards to planning.

[mekael]

> It want solved. There was some generic boilerplate that was added to IDEs but it wouldn't be project specific. It wasn't able to look at patterns within your own codebase and repeat them.

I left out some expository, apologies. For example, I rely pretty heavily on using VSA as a way to keep things self contained and thus created templates for each different functionality type (background worker, crud action, etc) where they already have the logging/database connection/code flow pattern, I just need to shove in whatever business logic is needed. Now, that logic is the hard part and would require me to explain it in excruciating detail to Claude, or write it out by hand, but it take the same amount of time either way.

[swiftcoder]

> from my perspective everyone writes all of their code using agents

HN/twitter/etc may be something of a bubble in that regard. As far as I can tell out in the real world, most normal software developers are much more likely to be using LLMs as fancy auto-complete than to be using agents.