what i'm seeing is agentic coding helps be(come) more ambitious

build your own framework, database, operating system, game engine etc

things that used to be infeasible (too hard, too big, …)

ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> agentic coding

In my personal experience, agentic coding wasn’t useful, but using a chat inference, was. I still need to be the critical path, but the LLM has, indeed, become a major force multiplier.

A few minutes ago, I submitted an app for review, that I started work on, alone, in February. The Quality of the new version is astounding. I’m absolutely thrilled.

It’s a full rewrite (backend server, and frontend client) of a fairly large app that’s been shipping for a couple of years, and that took over two years, to originally write.

I wouldn’t have even tried it, without an LLM. That made all the difference. The majority of the work was done with the $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription, but the last few days, as I developed supporting materials and Web sites, I used the $100/month Pro level. After my work, over the last few months, the upgrade was a “no brainer.”

But, at every step of the way, I needed to be there, to intimately review and manage the interaction with the LLM. There’s no way that I could trust it to “just do it.”

I’m sure that, sooner or later (likely sooner), LLMs will have progressed to the point that I can trust them to vibe-code a project like this, but I guarantee, that they aren’t quite there, yet.

To be fair, I know that I may have much higher standards than a fairly significant number of developers, but the end product of my work is about as far from “AI slop” as you can get.

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noduerme 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When it's your own codebase that you know intimately, you obviously don't want it polluted, and you want to continue to understand everything that's there. For rewriting things you understand perfectly, or porting code to different platforms, the LLMs truly are a force multiplier. But that's so different from the way they are used on new projects. Letting them make design decisions is the problem. To make design decisions, you have to understand the system as a whole.

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

you can also situate the agent within your codebase and have it only write things you review (or have it not write/change the code at all)

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Krei-se 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> as far from “AI slop” as you can get

as always: no code, no link, not even a description.

Incoming reasons: possible doxx, "internal", etc. pp.

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ChrisMarshallNY an hour ago | parent [-]

Sigh...

Seriously? I've explained this many times, but I assume that doing background research before insulting isn't a "modern" thing to do. Just Ready, Fire, Aim. Seriously, you could probably use ChatGPT to make a decent guess.

The issue is that the app addresses a specific (very privacy-aware) demographic. Each signup is manually vetted by two admins. It will probably never have more than a couple of thousand users, and the ones that are there, are more than a little [justified] paranoid.

Having several thousand curious geeks, do throwaway signups, just so they can see that the app is not for them, is not going to be helpful, so I never mention it here. If anyone really wants to know about it, I'm easy to contact. Unlike lots of folks, here, I am quite open about who I am.

The app, itself, is closed-source, but uses a significant number of open-source dependencies (that I also wrote -sometimes with AI help), which are easy to see.

And that's all I'll say.

Have a great day!

	▲	Krei-se an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]

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adammarples 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't even know any more. I wanted a weather bapp that shows the whole forecast on one page with no scrolling, so I was ambitious and asked anti-gravity to build one for me. Half an hour later, done. Then I asked codex to review it and half the stuff didn't even work, made up wind gust data, misaligned hourly data, polluted caches. So I asked codex to fix the issues. Did it? I don't even know, it said it did.

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kaashif 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The way to use AI is to make sure it has clear, verifiable success criteria, test suites, etc. Make sure any output has citations, reduce the need for trust to zero, etc.

I see people one shot stuff and it makes no sense, is completely fake half the time, just like you point out.

It should be the case that Codex and Claude Code should incorporate this kind of thing automatically at some point.

	▲	gwerbin 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Claude Code more or less does have the tools to do this: plan mode, todo lists, user question prompts, et al. What it does not have is a "guided" mode where the agent (or harness) interviews you and helps you structure a work plan for the agent, including eliciting those success criteria and any design constraints the user might have in mind (eg it will be used on a boat over slow satellite connection). I can't speak for OpenAI but I get the impression that Anthropic think of these things as opt-in power user features, perhaps on the premise that their LLMs alone are "smart enough".

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blfr 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Try Fable and make it write a ton of tests. I generally don't trust benchmarks, as they don't match my experience, but this one[1] very much does.

[1] https://www.primeintellect.ai/research/nanogpt-speedrun

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mynegation 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Great minds… that’s what I vibe coded with Claude couple of weeks ago.