[drob518]

So, I’ve explored AI coding, but my conclusion up to this point has been that it’s interesting, but the code is sometimes a mess, and sometimes it will completely crater the project to the point where you just have to throw it all away and start over. After reading this article, I keep wondering if we’re really being productive or just creating lots of crappy code at machine speeds now. It’s one thing to say that we are using a “security agent,” for example, to ensure the security of the code, but quite another to actually know (or at least strongly believe) that our code is really secure. With all the froth of generating thousands of lines of code, how are we sure? In some sense, my question is whether we’re building a Winchester Mystery House or a house of cards.

[skybrian]

Software developers working on their own have built monstrosities before (not as quickly) but it seems likely that this is a skill issue and we will learn how to use these tools better. You can tell coding agents to work on cleaning up code, improving the architecture, and so on.

Maybe adopting some hard constraints on code complexity that agents have to work within would help?

[drob518]

Yep, surely humans write bad code, too. But not nearly as fast. This feels a lot like hiring oodles of hyper-productive junior developers. Are we going to get true productivity out of that or a scrambled mess? I don’t know the answer to that. Or maybe the models get so much better that it’s like hiring oodles of senior developers and architects and the payoff is real.

[pxc]

Humans just don't commit the same kinds of booboos as LLMs do. My team at work recently started using LLM agents for coding and I have since seen WTFs that I know no human would ever write.

It's not all bad! It's also enormously fun. I've been able to work on things I'd been putting off forever. When I can use LLM agents, I less often feel paralyzed by perfectionism, which is probably the biggest productivity boost I get. My own code has not decreased in quality, and I think that for the truly important things, neither has that of my colleagues.

But LLMs don't make junior dev mistakes. They make "my brain has worms in it" mistakes.

[skybrian]

It used to be that most college graduates had little or no experience working on large-scale projects. Now they’ll get to speed-run the issues involved in maintaining a large project.

[drob518]

So, is that a good thing? There’s still something to be said for experience, no?

[skybrian]

Yes, getting out of college already having some experience using coding agents seems good.

[bee_rider]

Maybe the bots should be made to write MISRA-C. It isn’t like they get annoyed, right?