Am I supposed to be impressed by this? I think people are now just using agents for the sake of it. I'm perfectly happy running two simple agents, one for writing and one for reviewing. I don't need to go be writing code at faster than light speed. Just focusing on the spec, and watching the agent as it does its work and intervening when it goes sideways is perfectly fine with me. I'm doing 5-7x productivity easily, and don't need more than that.

I also spend most of my time reviewing the spec to make sure the design is right. Once I'm done, the coding agent can take 10 minutes or 30 minutes. I'm not really in that much of a rush.

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mjrbrennan 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes I'm still not really understanding this "run agents overnight" thing. Most of the time if I use claude it's done in 5-20 minutes. I've never wanted to have work done for me overnight...tomorrow is already plenty of time for more work, it's not going anywhere, and my employer isn't paying me to produce overnight.

	▲	tudelo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The only counter I have to this is that there are some workflows that have test environments, everything can't or shouldn't just run locally. Sometimes these test take time, and instead of babysitting the model to write code and run the build+deploy+test manually, you can send it off to work until the kinks are worked out. Add to that I have worked on many projects that take more than 20 minutes to fully build and run tests... unfortunately. And I would consider that part of the job of implementing a feature, and to reduce cycles I have to take. After the "green" signal I will manually review or send off some secondary reviews in other models. Is it wasteful? Probably. But its pretty damn fun (as long as I ignore the elephant in the room.)

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JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Am I supposed to be impressed by this?

No. But it is noteworthy. A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI. (Granted, everything SWEs complained about being tedious.)

From the customer’s perspective, waiting for buggy code tomorrow from San Francisco, buggy code tonight from India or buggy code from an AI at 4AM aren’t super different for maybe two thirds of use cases.

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timr an hour ago | parent [-]

> A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI. (Granted, everything SWEs complained about being tedious.)

Only if you ignore everything they generate. Look at all the comments saying that the agent hallucinates a result, generates always-passing tests, etc. Those are absolutely true observations -- and don't touch on the fact that tests can pass, the red/green approach can give thumbs up and rocket emojis all day long, and the code can still be shitty, brittle and riddled with security and performance flaws. And so now we have people building elaborate castles in the sky to try to catch those problems. Except that the things doing the catching are themselves prone to hallucination. And around we go.

So because a portion of (IMO always bad, but previously unrecognized as bad) coders think that these random text generators are trustworthy enough to run unsupervised, we've moved all of this chaotic energy up a level. There's more output, certainly, but it all feels like we've replaced actual intelligent thought with an army of monkeys making Rube Goldberg machines at scale. It's going to backfire.

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JumpCrisscross 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

> coders think that these random text generators are trustworthy enough to run unsupervised, we've moved all of this chaotic energy up a level

But it works well enough for most use cases. Most of what we do isn’t life or death.

	▲	timr 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> But it works well enough for most use cases. So does the code produced by any bad engineer. So either we’re finally admitting that all of that leetcode screening and engineer quality gating was a farce, or it wasn’t, and you’re wrong. I think the answer is in the middle, but the pendulum has swung too far in the “doesn’t matter” direction.

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genghisjahn 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I went the same way. At first I was splitting off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford, then I realized I just can't keep up with it all, running few agents around one issue in one directory is fast enough. Way faster than before and I can still follow what's happening.

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paganel 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford,

I still think that we, programmers, having to pay money in order to write code is a travesti. And I'm not talking about paying the license for the odd text editor or even for an operating system, I'm talking about day-to-day operations. I'm surprised that there isn't a bigger push-back against this idea.

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jeremyjh 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What is strange about paying for tools that improve productivity? Unless you consider your own time worthless you should always be open to spending more to gain more.

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cube00 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

No stock backed company will be paying developers more regardless of much more productive these tools make us. You'll be lucky if they pay for the proper Claude Max plan themselves considering most wouldn't even spring for IntelliJ.

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

Your own time is worthless if you’re not spending it doing something that makes more money. You don’t make more money increasing your productivity for work when you’re expected to work the same number of hours.

	▲	mr-wendel 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've spent a fair amount of time contracting -- this issue is even more relevant here. While I wasn't spending very much on AI tools, what I did spent was worth every penny... for the company I was supporting :). Fortunately, there was enough work to be done so productivity increases didn't decrease my billable hours. Even if it did, I still would have done it. If it helps me help others, then it's good for my reputation. Thats hard to put a price on, but absolutely worth what I paid in this case.

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fwip 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are the jobs out there actually paying people more?

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switchbak 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My old work machine used power quite aggressively - I was happy to pay for that (and turn it off at night!). This seems even more directly valuable.

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

Dw, there's quite a lot of push back against AI in some of the communities I hang around in. It's just rarely seldom visible here on HN.

It's usually not about the price, but more about the fact that a few megacorps and countries "own" the ability to work this way. This leads to some very real risks that I'm pretty sure will materialize at some point in time, including but not limited to:

- Geopolitical pressure - if some ass-hat of a president hypothetically were to decide "nuh uh - we don't like Spain, they're not being nice to us!", they could forbid AI companies to deliver their services to that specific country.

- Price hikes - if you can deliver "$100 worth of value" per hour, but "$1000 worth of value" per hour with the help of AI, then provider companies could still charge up to $899 per hour of usage and it'd still make "business sense" for you to use them since you're still creating more value with them than without them.

- Reduction in quality - I believe people who were senior developers _before_ starting to use AI assisted coding are still usually capable of producing high quality output. However every single person I know who "started coding" with tools like Claude Code produce horrible horrible software, esp. from a security p.o.v. Most of them just build "internal tools" for themselves, and I highly encourage that. However others have pursued developing and selling more ambitious software...just to get bitten by the fact that it's much more to software development than getting semi-correct output from an AI agent.

- A massive workload on some open source projects. We've all heard about projects closing down their bug bounty programs, declining AI generated PRs etc.

- The loss of the joy - some people enjoy it, some people don't.

We're definitely still in the early days of AI assisted / AI driven coding, and no one really knows how it'll develop...but don't mistake the bubble that is HN for universal positivity and acclaim of AI in the coding space :).

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xandrius 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's silly, who wouldn't answer yes to the question "would you like to finish your task faster?". The real trick is to produce more but by putting less effort than before.

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tdeck an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> who wouldn't answer yes to the question "would you like to finish your task faster?"

People who enjoy the process of completing the task?

	▲	lmz 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe we'd see "coding gyms" like how white collar workers have gyms for the physical exercise they're not getting from their work.

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the_af 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you finish faster, you'll be given another task. You're not freeing yourself sooner or spending less effort, you're working the same number of hours for the same pay. Your reward is not joining the ranks of those laid off.

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ge96 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would be impressed if I could say "here's $100 turn it into $1000" but you still gotta do the thinking.

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aray07 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

yup, agree - i spend most of my time reviewing the spec. The highest leverage time is now deciding what to work on and then working on the spec. I ended up building the verify skill (https://github.com/opslane/verify) because I wanted to ensure claude follows the spec. I have found that even after you have the spec - it can sometimes not follow it and it takes a lot of human review to catch those issues.