[SoftTalker]

It's very difficult to keep AI focused, when it barfs out 3 pages of reply in response to a one-sentence prompt. It's sort of its nature for some reason, it's very impressive if you've never seen it but it's exhausting to use for very long. It's like a very eager assistant who doesn't have enough experience to understand scope.

[bigmattystyles]

3 pages of reply or overly verbose code, often without abstractions - I read all the posters here and in other forums say that programming has shifted towards reviewing AI output rather than coding said output manually; I agree, however, I just don't buy that everyone is actually reviewing the code as intensely as one would expect - there is a tendency that arrived rather quickly to assume that the AI is correct and efficient. I guess the ultimate reviewer is another AI agent I guess.

[admax88qqq]

I think ultimately you still have to pay down tech debt eventually. Either through bankruptcy (throwaway the project) or servicing the debt (refactoring, rearchitecting etc).

It's not different than when coding by hand, often we take shortcuts by hand that we then have to pay for later. It really just becomes a judgement call on when to stop prompting new features and start service what you have.

I think with AI and vibecoding its tempting to assume the output is good and chase the dopamine hits of more features, more features, more features, but eventually you get stuck.

That being said AI is also a great tool at paying down tech debt. It's great at helping you read a codebase and can be great at making the mechanical changes you want. And I think there is some truth to the story that newer models will be able to pay down debt (fix the slop) of older models. But its all shades of grey, newer models are better than older ones, but can I emit slop with 5.6 faster than 5.7 will be able to fix it in the future? Nobody knows.

It's not like human projects are devoid of bad code, its all tradeoffs and shades of gray. But to be honest I haven't written a line of code by hand in a while.

[a_c]

I find it highly similar between running agents and running human teams.

Clear goal, share context, delegate but verify. Running a team of engineers also inevitably generates pages and pages of material, design spec, code, test, review. Just that we now do that with agents and agents are way less trust worthy

[theshrike79]

What's good for agents is good for humans. That's about it.

The only difference is that agents don't deal well with ambiguity in processes. If your build process is 15 steps, a human will just endure because "that's how it's always been" - an agent will keep stumbling until you either optimise the process or document it.

And now it's better for humans too, they either got a simplified process or better documentation.

[bryanrasmussen]

>It's sort of its nature for some reason

I've known some people who can never stop talking. Maybe they are overly represented in the training set.

[recursive]

> for some reason

Usage is metered/billed by the token. This suggests a few possible hypotheses for why they might tend to be verbose.

[overgard]

The verbosity in code is also a huge problem. I asked it to introduce 4 functions in my project (like, literally, just functions) and I'm looking at 32 files changed and two spec files that are total 200 lines long. It's functional, but jesus, this is going to need a refactor.