IME, it's faster and less frustrating to just write the code myself, if the goal is to get code to my quality standards.

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dilyevsky 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Respectfully, unless someone is really really bad at articulating what the quality standards are or works with a very niche stack that is definitely not the case anymore with SOTA models

	▲	WorldMaker an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Respectfully, the current models are all trained on everyone else's legacy code as of roughly six months ago and largely always will be. If I'm doing my job right an LLM cannot meet my personal quality bar on its own because I will always need innovation and excellence they will never see and thus cannot deliver. I also think that training these tools on my personal quality bar is more work than just writing it myself.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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throwaway894345 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

TL;DR — there’s a whole lot of craft in how you use agents

I think that’s mostly true, but also I think there is some skill to using agents well. Specifically, work with agents to get a really good product requirements document, then task it out into very narrow user stories / vertical slices (this takes some iterating—the AI really seems to want to think in horizontal layers today), then maybe walk through the code interfaces to be super sure you are aligned. At each step, I make the agent interrogate me thoroughly with every question it can think of, and even if we stop now we will have a system design and tickets that are much higher quality than me thinking alone. I could hand those off to anyone to implement, but I think having an agent TDD their way through the code is the sweet spot.

Whenever the agent is doing something I don’t like (e.g., some coding style thing), I pause and have another agent help me write a style guide that agents must read. This slows me down at first but I think it will pay off in time.