I wonder at the end of this if it's the still worth the risk?

A lot of how I form my thoughts is driven by writing code, and seeing it on screen, running into its limitations.

Maybe it's the kind of work I'm doing, or maybe I just suck, but the code to me is a forcing mechanism into ironing out the details, and I don't get that when I'm writing a specification.

I second this. This* is the matter against which we form understanding. This here is the work at hand, our own notes, discussions we have with people, the silent walk where our brain kinda process errors and ideas .. it's always been like this since i was a kid, playing with construction toys. I never ever wanted somebody to play while I wait to evaluate if it fits my desires. Desires that often come from playing.

Outsourcing this to an LLM is similar to an airplane stall .. I just dip mentally. The stress goes away too, since I assume the LLM will get rid of the "problem" but I have no more incentives to think, create, solve anything.

Still blows my mind how different people approach some fields. I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them .. but I'm not in that group.

I still do this, but when I'm reviewing what's been written and / or testing what's been built.

How I see it is we've reverted back to a heavier spec type approach, however the turn around time is so fast with agents that it still can feel very iterative simply because the cost of bailing on an approach is so minimal. I treat the spec (and tests when applicable) as the real work now. I front load as much as I can into the spec, but I also iterate constantly. I often completely bail on a feature or the overall approach to a feature as I discover (with the agent) that I'm just not happy with the gotchas that come to light.

AI agents to me are a tool. An accelerator. I think there are people who've figured out a more vibey approach that works for them, but for now at least, my approach is to review and think about everything we're producing, which forms my thoughts as we go.

That's also how I feel.

I think you have every right to doubt those telling us that they run 5 agents to generate a new SAAS-product while they are sipping latté in a bar. To work like that I believe you'll have to let go of really digging into the code, which in my experience is needed if want good quality.

Yet I think coding agents can be quite a useful help for some of the trivial, but time consuming chores.

For instance I find them quite good at writing tests. I still have to tweak the tests and make sure that they do as they say, but overall the process is faster IMO.

They are also quite good at brute-forcing some issue with a certain configuration in a dark corner of your android manifest. Just know that they WILL find a solution even if there is none, so keep them on a leash!

Today I used Claude for bringing a project I abandoned 5 years ago up to speed. It's still at work in progress, but the task seemed insurmountable (in my limited spare time) without AI, now it feels like I'm half-way there in 2-3 hours.

I also second this. I find that I write better by hand, although I work on niche applications it’s not really standard crud or react apps. I use LLMs in the same way i used to used stack overflow, if I go much farther to automate my work than that I spend more time on cleanup compared to if I just write code myself.

Sometimes the AI does weird stuff too. I wrote a texture projection for a nonstandard geometric primitive, the projection used some math that was valid only for local regions… long story. Claude kept on wanting to rewrite the function to what it thought was correct (it was not) even when I directed to non related tasks. Super annoying. I ended up wrapping the function in comments telling it to f#=% off before it would leave it alone.

Exactly. 30 years ago a mathematician I knew said to me: "The one thing that you can say for programming is that it forces you to be precise."

We vibe around a lot in our heads and that's great. But it's really refreshing, every so often, to be where the rubber meets the road.

In 1987 when I first started coding, I would either write my first attempt in BASIC and see it was too slow and rewrite parts in assembly or I would know that I had to write what I wanted from the get go in assembly because the functionality wasn’t exposed at all in BASIC (using the second 64K of memory or using double hires graphics).

This past week, I spent a a days modifying a web solution written by someone else + converting it from a Terraform based deployment to CloudFormation using Codex - without looking at the code as someone who hasn’t done front in development in a decade - I verified the functionality.

More relevantly but related, I spent a couple of hours thinking through an architecture - cloud + an Amazon managed service + infrastructure as code + actual coding, diagramming it, labeling it , and thinking about the breakdown and phases to get it done. I put all of the requirements - that I would have done anyway - into a markdown file and told Claude and Codex to mark off items as I tested each item and summarize what it did.

Looking at the amount of work, between modifying the web front end and the new work, it would have taken two weeks with another developer helping me before AI based coding. It took me three or four days by myself.

The real kicker though is while it worked as expected for a couple of hundred documents, it fell completely to its knees when I threw 20x documents into the system. Before LLMs, this would have made me look completely incompetent telling the customer I now wasted two weeks worth of time and 2 other resources.

Now, I just went back to the literal drawing board, rearchitected it, did all of the things with code that the managed services abstracted away with a few tweaks, created a new mark down file and was done in a day. That rework would have taken me a week by itself. I knew the theory behind what the managed service was doing. But in practice I had never done it.

It’s been over a decade where I was responsable for a delivery that I could do by myself without delegating to other people or that was simple enough that I wouldn’t start with a design document for my own benefit. Now within the past year, I can take on larger projects by myself without the coordination/“mythical man Month” overhead.

I can also in a moment of exasperation say to Codex “what you did was an over complicated stupid mess, rethink your implementation from first principles” without getting reported to HR.

There is also a lot of nice to have gold plating that I will do now knowing that it will be a lot faster

That's because many developers are used to working like this.

With AI, the correct approach is to think more like a software architect.

Learning to plan things out in your head upfront without to figure things out while coding requires a mindset shift, but is important to work effectively with the new tools.

To some this comes naturally, for others it is very hard.

Using AI or writing your own code isn't an xor thing. You can still write the code but have a coding assistant or something an alt/cmd-tab away. I enjoy writing code, it relaxes me so that's what I do but when I need to look something up or i'm not clear on the syntax for some particular operation instead of tabbing to a browser and google.com I tab to the agent and ask it to take a look. For me, this is especially helpful for CSS and UI because I really suck at and dislike that part of development.

I also use these things to just plan out an approach. You can use plan mode for yourself to get an idea of the steps required and then ask the agent to write it to a file. Pull up the file and then go do it yourself.

Sounds like the coders equivalent of the Whorfian hypothesis.

Any sufficiently detailed specification converges on code.

I couldn't agree more. It's often when you are in the depth of the details that I make important decisions on how to engineer the continuation.

Are there still people under the impression that the correct way to use Stack Overflow all these years was to copy & paste without analyzing what the code did and making it fit for purpose?

If I have to say, we're just waiting for the AI concern caucus to get tired of performing for each other and justifying each other's inaction in other facets of their lives.

I was just thinking this the other day after I did a coding screen and didn't do well. I know the script for the interviewee is your not suppsed to write any code until you talk through the whole thing, but I think i woukd have done better if I could have just wrote a bunch of throw away code to iterate on.

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