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danenania 10 hours ago

I know of many experienced and capable engineers working on complex stuff who are driving basically all their development through agents. This includes production level work. This is the norm now in the SV startup world at least.

You don't just YOLO it. You do extensive planning when features are complex, and you review output carefully.

The thing is, if the agent isn't getting it to the point where you feel like you might need to drop down and edit manually, agents are now good enough to do those same "manual edits" with nearly 100% reliability if you are specific enough about what you want to do. Instead of "build me x, y, z", you can tell it to rename variables, restructure functions, write specific tests, move files around, and so on.

So the question isn't so much whether to use an agent or edit code manually—it's what level of detail you work at with the agent. There are still times where it's easier to do things manually, but you never really need to.

matt3210 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Can you show some example? I feel like there would be streams or YouTube lets plays on this if it was working well

sixtyj 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would like to see it as well. It seems to me that everybody sells shovels only. But nobody haven’t seen gold yet. :)

shsush 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The real secret to agent productivity is letting go of your understanding of the code and trusting the AI to generate the proper thing. Very pro agent devs like ghuntley will all say this.

And it makes sense. For most coding problems the challenge isn’t writing code. Once you know what to write typing the code is a drop in the bucket. AI is still very useful, but if you really wanna go fast you have to give up on your understanding. I’ve yet to see this work well outside of blog posts, tweets, board room discussions etc.

submain 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The real secret to agent productivity is letting go of your understanding of the code and trusting the AI to generate the proper thing

The few times I've done that, the agent eventually faced a problem/bug it couldn't solve and I had to go and read the entire codebase myself.

Then, found several subtle bugs (like writing private keys to disk even when that was an explicit instruction not to). Eventually ended up refactoring most of it.

It does have value on coming up with boilerplate code that I then tweak.

maplethorpe 8 hours ago | parent [-]

You made the mistake of looking at the code, though. If you didn't look at the code, you wouldn't have known those bugs existed.

PunchyHamster 5 hours ago | parent [-]

fixing code now is orders of magnitude cheaper than fixing it in month or two when it hits production.

which might be fine if you're doing proof of concept or low risk code, but it can also bite you hard when there is a bug actively bleeding money and not a single person or AI agent in the house that knows how anything work

urig 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's just irresponsible advice. There is so little actual evidence of this technology being able to produce high quality maintainable code that asking us to trust it blindly is borderline snake-oil peddling.

hansmayer 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Not borderline - it is just straight snake-oil peddling.

_zoltan_ 6 hours ago | parent [-]

yet it works? where have you been for the last 2 years?

calling this snake oil is like when the horse carriage riders were against cars.

Kubuxu 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t see how I would feel comfortable pushing the current output of LLMs into high-stakes production (think SLAs, SRE).

Understanding of the code in these situation is more important than the code/feature existing.

shsush 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree and am the same. Using them to enhance my knowledge and as well as autocomplete on steroids is the sweet spot. Much easier to review code if im “writing” it line by line.

I think the reality is a lot of code out there doesn’t need to be good, so many people benefit from agents etc.

danenania 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can use an agent while still understanding the code it generates in detail. In high stakes areas, I go through it line by line and symbol by symbol. And I rarely accept the first attempt. It’s not very different from continually refining your own code until it meets the bar for robustness.

Agents make mistakes which need to be corrected, but they also point out edge cases you haven’t thought of.

heavyset_go 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The real secret to agent productivity is letting go of your understanding of the code

This is negligence, it's your job to understand the system you're building.

hansmayer 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not to blow your bubble, but I've seen agents expose Stripe credentials by hardcoding them as text into a react frontend app, so, no kids, do not "let go" of code understanding, lest you want to appear as the next story along the lines of "AI dropped my production database".

yonaguska 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is sarcasm right?

PunchyHamster 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I wish, that's dev brain on AI sadly.

We've been unfucking architecture done like that for a month after the dev that had hallucination session with their AI left.

danenania 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A lot of that would be people working on proprietary code I guess. And most of the people I know who are doing this are building stuff, not streaming or making videos. But I'm sure there must be content out there—none of this is a secret. There are probably engineers working on open source stuff with these techniques who are sharing it somewhere.

matt3210 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s understandable, I also wouldn’t stream my next idea for everyone to see

dmurvihill 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Let’s see it then

_zoltan_ 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

go on reddit and you can see a million of these vibe coded codebases. is that not good enough?

9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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hansmayer 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

+1 here. Lets see those productivity gains!