[munksbeer]

I think a lot of us have stopped talking to each other about this. I see it the other way round to you. I see constant scepticism and doubt that LLMs can build anything useful, and whenever provided with examples, the goalposts just move.

And at my own firm, I think every developer is generating most of their code using agentic coding. We're still sceptical enough that we are doing the usual heavy handed human review process, so we're not seeing a huge speed up in delivery times, but we are seeing a volume increase. That is because writing the changes and raising the PRs is much faster, but also a lot of boring admin and support work is now mostly done by LLMs. Reports of instability, vague client requests, etc? Throw the LLM at them and it usually figure it out why I continue to engineer.

So I know, first hand, that these things are very good. I also know second and third hand that pretty much every fintech in the industry is as heavily using agentic coding as we are.

And then I come to HN or reddit and I see people telling us that they cannot write decent production code, and this is just wrong. This isn't opinion wrong, it is objectively wrong. Any fintech that wants to keep up will tell you this.

I can't speak for other industries but I can't imagine they're different.

So, I'm not sure what to conclude from this. I don't want to be uncharitable, but when HN/reddit posts just don't match the reality I see for myself, I have no choice but to categorise them as being emotionally driven to stick to a particular narrative, and so I can dismiss them.

[teliosix]

It is all the same narratives from around the invention of the power loom if you look into it.

What I take from that time also is that the hand loom weavers were not incorrect. The power loom did not do as good of a job as they did by hand.

You can still by a hand woven shirt today at a premium price.

There is a category error as if quality is the product as opposed to one input of the product.

You probably don't get to be a master craftsman without that quality mindset so they aren't wrong but missing the forest for the trees.

[queenkjuul]

I use Claude Code at a fintech, and I'm seeing garbage PRs from careless coworkers all the time. I'm having to correct Claude output regularly.

Yes, it does nearly all the typing for me now. But left to its own devices, it'll happily spit out awful code.

[skydhash]

> I see constant scepticism and doubt that LLMs can build anything useful, and whenever provided with examples, the goalposts just move.

> I see people telling us that they cannot write decent production code, and this is just wrong.

At least for me, that has never been the counterpoint that I’ve been making. I’ve never cared about code itself, especially with languages like Java and Kotlin, where you basically autocomplete most of the code, and with SDK like ios where you can collect snippets for most of the patterns that you need. And with frameworks like Laravel, where most big additions are done with the tooling. And because code is so repetitive, editors like emacs and vim have lots of features and plugins to help with copying and pasting (registers, macros, navigation, snippets,…)

And the fact is some code you wrote today will be worthless tomorrow and will be replaced and deleted. So, it’s very rare to care about some particular snippets or patch of code.

What myself, and others, have been complaining about is the quality of the codebase and the sustainability of the practice. Especially with the associated claims about increased productivity.

I care about correctness. Simplicity and reduced amount of code increase my confidence that I can achieve it. New features, until tested in production, are more probable to decrease the reliability of the software. And with each fix for a bug, I need to make sure that I’m not adding five more.

To this day, I’ve not seen any compelling arguments that is about writing better code reliably. I’ve seen a lot about writing more code. It’s like manager thinking if you’re not at your computer typing, you’re not working.

> We're still sceptical enough that we are doing the usual heavy handed human review process, so we're not seeing a huge speed up in delivery times, but we are seeing a volume increase

Are you seeing a quality increase? Less customer bugs, less outages, faster resolution? Are you measuring those?

[munksbeer]

> Are you seeing a quality increase? Less customer bugs, less outages, faster resolution? Are you measuring those?

We're not at the stage to measure yet. We may be behind others, not sure. Actually, this isn't quite true. I was interested, so a created an ad-hoc report (with AI) on PRs landed per week over time. This has gone up over the last 6 momths. But that is hard to say why that is. It might just be people are raising smaller PRs because it becomes easy to have the AI split things up, while before, people were too lazy to do this.

Our bottleneck is still that we want humans to review. Sometimes we spot errors, but our pre-existing testing frameworks are very robust already, so if these pass, we're very confident to release to production, and the agent is excellent at understanding the existing testing frameworks and adding to them for new stuff.

So in our team, we don't often see blatant logic errors. It is mostly to do with things like using a pattern that is used elsewhere in the codebase (or not at all) and doesn't belong in our specific section of the code (we have a large monorepo). These become fewer as we enhance our ruleset (AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md) for our particular developers.

[skydhash]

> And then I come to HN or reddit and I see people telling us that they cannot write decent production code, and this is just wrong. This isn't opinion wrong, it is objectively wrong

So how can you justify this comment of yours from your reply if you’re not measuring anything? Mind you, I can easily get good results from AI tools, but I don’t like the experience and the code is often over-engineered and drifts away from my target architecture.

But the worst is quickly loosing sight of the tiny technical details that matters when solving bugs or altering features. I don’t like typing code. What I like is to be able to go directly to the code that I need to change, modify it, and then verify that it works. Most of my time is spent deep thinking about the design of the software which is orthogonal to code.

And if there is one thing that is common about people fully onboard with LLM is that they can talk about the product, but they can’t argue about its behavior and its correctness. There’s no intrinsic model that they can compare with the real code. They don’t know the edge cases, the technical pitfalls, how the software will react if you modify one component. Any brainstorming session quickly turns into a slog because they cannot contrast approaches anymore. You can see the decay of understanding in realtime.

[munksbeer]

Ok. I get what you're saying. I definitely agree with losing touch with the code, but I still review everything the agent writes, and I steer it heavily. My perspective is from what I observe. The entire industry (my industry) is embracing agentic coding. And I don't believe developers are doing it because they're stupid.

I think it is going to continue to get better, and I don't think we'll be having this argument in two years time. Our entire industry will look very different.