Comment by sothatsit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sothatsit | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think he is saying agents are not useful at all, just that they are not anywhere near the capability of human software developers. Karpathy later says he used agents to write the Rust translation of algorithms he wrote in Python. He also explicitly says that agents can be useful for writing boilerplate or for code that can be very commonly found online. So I don't think he is saying they are not useful at all. Instead, he is just holding agents to a higher standard of working on a novel new codebase, and saying they don't pass that bar.

Tbh I think people underestimate how much software development work is just writing boilerplate or common patterns though. A very large percentage of the web development work I do is just writing CRUD boilerplate, and agents are great at it. I also find them invaluable for searching through large codebases, and for basic code review, but I see these use-cases discussed less even though they're a big part of what I find useful from agents.

I’m not saying he’s saying agents aren’t useful at all. It’s literally in the quotes I provided that he says they are useful for some subset of tasks.

I’m saying that he is answering the question “are agents useful at all”. not “can agents replace humans”.

His answer is mostly not. He generally prefers autocomplete. But they are useful for some limited tasks.

Saying "He’s talking about whether agents are currently useful at all" is negatively loaded. It is very easy to take that and assume the answer is "no" based on the "at all".

If you wanted to be more neutral, you could have said something like "He's also questioning how useful agents really are today". That wouldn't have implied that they're not useful at all, but instead that they're less useful than people are claiming.

That question doesn’t do enough to highlight how wrong the OP’s interpretation was. He’s going far beyond just stating that agents are less useful than people are claiming. Less useful than people are claiming fits the OP’s interpretation.

> I’m not saying he’s saying agents aren’t useful at all

I'm not saying you're saying he's saying agents aren't useful at all

You’re not the person I’m replying to.

The person I’m replying to said

>I don't think he is saying agents are not useful at all, just that they are not anywhere near the capability of human software developers.

Implying I was supporting the first clause.

My biggest takeaway is that agents/LLMs in general are super helpful when paired together with a human who knows the inside and out of software development, who uses it side-by-side with their normal work.

They start being less useful when you start treating them as "I can send them ill-specified stuff, ignore them for 10 minutes and merge their results", as things spiral out of control. Basically "vibe-coding" as a useful concept doesn't work for projects you need to iterate on, only for things you feel OK with throwing away eventually.

Augmenting the human intellect with LLMs? Usually a increase in productivity. Replacing human coworkers with LLMs? Good luck, have fun.

It does seem pretty clear that an individual who possess super high quality human capital, paired with something like an LLM (provided the LLM is good enough relative to the individual) can be a powerful combination.

The issues are:

1) There isnt enough supply of those individuals 2) Such an LLM of that kind doesnt exist (at least not in consistent nature) 3) The amount invested into what is going on will not yield returns commensurate to the required rate of return

Interestingly enough, I believe Andrej Karpathy is also focusing on education (levelling up the supply of human capital) - I came to the above conclusion about a month ago. And it 'feels' right to me.

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