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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

My experience with coding agents leads me to believe using something like this will end up being more noise and work than ROI

I think that depends on how far out your horizon is. If you're only looking one task out, or maybe a few weeks out, then it's not worth investing the time yet. On the other hand, if you're looking at how your engineering team will work in 3 years time it's definitely worth starting to look at it now.

An example that comes to mind: having a bot that automatically spins up an environment when a library is updated, runs through the tests, and identifies why a codebase doesn't work with the update, and fixes it then opens an appropriate PR that passes all the tests for humans to review would be incredibly useful.

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The LLMs are a crapshoot, and probably always will be, for reliable automatic fixing of anything. They save me time 50% of the time. The other 50% they just can’t put enough together to grok what the existing code does, but damn if their code doesn’t look like it should work.

Why?

In 3 years time this won't be how these tools work. So it feels like you're saying we should invest time in something that doesn't work and will be redundant in 6 months.

Worse, your example is one that AI agents are notoriously bad at. Give them an error like that and they're more liable to break the existing functionality to fix it, after littering the code with tons of log statements.

When most of the time the actual fix is a silly little mistake that takes one line to fix.

And in five years time all human engineers will be replaced. Why not just quit now?

Especially odd for someone working in IT. If I'd only learn what doesn't change in a few years I'd have to find new work.

You misunderstood, there's no point learning it until it works. Don't bother until it's stable, picking up agentic coding will be trivial, because it has to be trivial to work well.

To get agentic coding working 9 months ago you were massaging context, 6 months ago you'd be hooking up MCP servers, 3 months ago you'd be writing a gazillion .claude files.

But all of that is utterly useless knowledge. That's not a transferrable skill.

Using AI is much more effective if you write the code yourself, using AI as a supercharged Stack Overflow.

A programmer + AI supercharged SO > A programmer + agentic coding

So stop wasting your time learning how to get agentic coding working today, especially as the method keeps changing. There's no point learning the voodoo and rain-dancing of this iteration of today's coding agents. Try them, and until they work, discard them.

We are unlikely to see these things progress beyond "a never learning junior that doesn't remember what it did last hour"

It's a limitation inherited from how they are designed. Fine if you babysit them, but they quickly get off the rails and waste my time too. Hence to original question about people actually using something like Jules versus speculating how nice it would be

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