As you as you start to work with a codebase that you care about and need to seriously maintain, you'll see what a mess these agents make.
The practical and opportunistic response is too tell them "Tough cookies" and watch the problems steadily compound into more lucrative revenue opportunities for us. I really have no remorse for these people. Because half of them were explicitly warned against this approach upfront but were psychologically incapable of adjusting expectations or delaying LLM deployment until the technology proved itself. If you've ever had your professional opinion dismissed by the same people regarding you as the SME, you understand my pain.
I suppose I'm just venting now. While we are now extracting money from the dumbassery, the client entitlement and management of their emotions that often comes with putting out these fires never makes for a good time.
At what point do we realize that the best way to prompt is with formal language? I.e. a programming language?
Now that's a scary thought that basically goes against "1 trillion dollars can't be wrong".
Now, LLMs are probably great range extenders, but they're not wonder weapons.
E.g. I use these tools to clean up or reorganize old tests (with coverage and diff viewers checking of things I might miss), update documentation with cross links (with documentation linters checking for errors I miss), convert tests into benchmarks running as part of CI, make log file visualizers, and many more.
These tools are amazing for dealing with the long tail of boring issues that you never get to, and when used in this fashion they actually abruptly increase the quality of the codebase.
But any time someone mentions using AI without proof of success? Vibe coding sucks.
What you are doing is by definition not vibe coding.
Despite being soul sucking, I do it because A: It lets me achieve goals despite lacking energy/time for projects that don't require the level of commitment or care that i provide professionally. B: it reduces how much RSI i experience. Typing is a serious concern for me these days.
To mitigate the soul sucking i've been side projecting better review tools. Which frankly i could use for work anyway, as reviewing PRs from humans could be better too. Also inline with review tools, i think a lot of soul sucking is having to provide specificity, so i hope to be able to integrate LLMs into the review tool and speak more naturally to it. Eg i belive some IDEs (vscode? no idea) can let Claude/etc see the cursor, so you can say "this code looks incorrect" without needing to be extremely specific. A suite of tooling that improves this code sharing to Claude/etc would also reduce the inane specificity that seems to be required to make LLMs even remotely reliable for me.
[1]: though we don't seem to have a term for varying amounts of vibe. Some people consider vibe to be 100% complete ignorance of the architecture/code being built. In which case imo nothing i do is vibe, which is absurd to me but i digress.
I concur it is different from what you call vibecoding.
We use agents very aggressively, combined with beads, tons of tests, etc.
You treat them like any developer, and review the code in PRs, provide feedback, have the agents act, and merge when it's good.
We have gained tremendous velocity and have been able to tackle far more out of the backlog that we'd been forced to keep in the icebox before.
This idea of setting the bar at "agents work without code reviews" is nuts.
I know people have emotional responses to this, but if you think people aren’t effectively using agents to ship code in lots of domains, including existing legacy code bases, you are incorrect.
Do we know exactly how to do that well, of course not, we still fruitlessly argue about how humans should write software. But there is a growing body of techniques on how to do agent first development, and a lot of those techniques are naturally converging because they work.
This is not to suggest that AI tools do not have value but that “I just have agents writing code and it works great!” Has yet to hit its test.
I get it; I do. It's rapidly challenging the paradigm that we've setup over the years in a way that it's incredibly jarring, but this is going to be our new reality or you're going to be left behind in MOST industries; highly regulated industries are a different beast.
So; instead of just out-of-hand dismissing this, figure out the best ways to integrate agents into your and your teams'/companies' workstreams. It will accelerate the work and change your role from what it is today to something different; something that takes time and experience to work with.
I’m available for consulting when you need something done correctly.
> It will accelerate the work and change your role from what it is today to something different;
My short experience with LLM reviewing my code is that LLM's output is overly explanatory and it slows me down.
> something that takes time and experience to work with.
But it's not the argument. The argument is that these tools provide lower-quality output and checking this output often takes more time than doing this work oneself. It's not that "we're conservative and afraid of changes", heck, you're talking to a crowd that used to celebrate a new JS framework every week!
There is a push to accept lower quality and to treat it as a new normal, and people who appreciate high-quality architecture and code express their concern.
This doesn't hurt to try and will give valuable and detailed feedback much more quickly than even an experienced developer seeing the project for the first time.
This may be a result of me using tools poorly, or more likely evaluating merits which matter less than I think. But I don’t think we can see that yet as people just invented these agent workflows and we haven’t seen it yet.
Note that the situation was not that different before LLMs. I’ve seen PMs with all the tickets setup, engineers making PRs with reviews, etc and not making progress on the product. The process can be emulated without substantive work.
I've been using LLMs to augment development since early December 2023. I've expanded the scope and complexity of the changes made since then as the models grew. Before beads existed, I used a folder of markdown files for externalized memory.
Just because you were late to the party doesn't mean all of us were.
It wasn't a party I liked back in 2023. I'm just repeating the same stuff I see said over and over again here, but there has been a step change with Opus 4.5.
You can still it in action now because the other models are still where Opus was at a while ago. I recently needed to make small change to script I was using. It is a tiny (50 line) script written with the help of AI's ages ago, but was subtly wrong in so many ways. It's now become clear neither the AI's (I used several and cross checked) nor myself had a clue about what we were dealing with. The current "seems to work" version was created after much blood caused by misunderstandings was spilt, exposing bugs that had to be fixed.
I asked Claude 4.6 to fix yet another misunderstanding, and the result was a patch changing the minimum number of lines to get the job done. Just reviewing such a surgical modification was far easier than doing it myself.
I gave exactly the same prompt to Gemini. The result was a wholesale rearrangement of the code. Maybe it was good, but the effort to verify that was far lager than just doing it myself. It was a very 2023 experience.
The usual 2023 experience for me was ask an AI write some greenfield code, and get a result that looked like someone had changed variable names in something they found on the web after a brief search for code that looked like it might do a similar job. If you got lucky, it might have found something that was indeed very similar, but in my case that was rare. Asking it to modify code unlike something it had seen before was like asking someone to poke your eyes with a stick.
As I said, some of the organisers of this style of party seem have gotten their act together, so now it is well worth joining their parties. But this is a newish development.
I'm seeing amazing result to with agents, when provided an well formed knowledge base and directed through each piece of work like its a sprint. Review and iron out scope requirements, api surface/contract, have agents create multi phase implementation plans and technical specifications in a share dev directory and to make high quality changes logs, document future consideration and any bugs/issues found that can be deferred. Every phase is addressed with a human code review along with gemini who is great at catching drift from spec and bugs in less obvious places.
While I'm sure an enterprise code base could still be an issue and would require even more direction (and opus I wont let touch java, it codes like an enterprise java greybeard who loves to create an interface/factory for everything), I think that's still just a tooling issues.
I'm not of the super pro AI camp, but having followed its development and used it throughout. For the first time I am actual amazed and bothered, and convinced if people dont embrace these tools, they will be left behind. No they dont 10-100x a jr dev, but if someone has proper domain knowledge to direct the agent, performs dual research with it to iron things out with the human actually understanding the problem space, 2-5x seems quite reasonable currently if driven by a capable developer. But this just move the work to review and documentation maintenance/crafting. Which has its own fatigue and is less rewarding for a programmers mind who loves to solve challenges and gets dopamine from it .
But given how man people are adverse...I dont think anyone who embraces it is going to have job security issues and be replaced, but here are many capable engineers who might due to their own reservations. I'm amazed by how many intelligent and capable people try llms/agents like a political straw man, there is no reasoning with them. They say vibe coding sucks (it does for anything more than a small throw away that wont be maintained), yet their examples for agents/llm not working is it can't just take a prompt and produce the best code ever and automatically and manifest the knowledge needed to work on their codebase. You still need to put in effort and learn to actually perform the engineering with the tools, but if it doesnt take a paragraph with no AGENTS.md and turn it into a feature or bug fix they are not good to them. Yeah they will get distracted and fuck up, just like if you throw 9/10 developers in the same situation and told them to get to work with no knowledge of the code base or domain and have their pr in by noon.
Source? Proofs? It's not the first, second or even third round on this rodeo.
In other words, notto disu shittu agen.
Not to say that there's no value in AI written code in these codebases, because there is plenty. But this whole thing where 6 agents run overnight and "tada" in the morning with production ready code is...not real.
Similarly, a lot of the AGI-hype comments exist to expand the scope of the space. It's not real, but it helps to position products and win arguments based on hypotheticals.
Proprietary embedded system documentation is not exactly ubiquitous. You must provide reference material and guardrails where the training is weakest.
This applies to everything in ML: it will be weakest at the edges.
You can get extremely good results assuming your spec is actually correct (and you're willing to chew through massive quantities of tokens / wait long enough).
No pesky developers siphoning away equity!
Is it ever the case that the spec is entirely correct (and without underspecified parts)? I thought the reason we write code is because it's much easier to express a spec as code than it is to get a similar level of precision in prose.
The bots even now can really help you identify technical problems / mistakes / gaps / bad assumptions, but there's no replacing "I know what the business wants/needs, and I know what makes my product manager happy, and I know what 'feels' good" type stuff.
Also known as "compiling source code".
I hope that you are successful!