Comment by jumploops | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jumploops | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these resonate with me, particularly the mental fatigue. It feels like normal coding forced me to slow my brain down, whereas now my mind is the limit.

For context, I started an experiment to rebuild a previous project entirely with LLMs back in June '25 ("fully vibecoded" - not even reading the source).

After iterating and finally settling on a design/plan/debug loop that works relatively well, I'm now experiencing an old problem like new: doing too much!

As a junior engineer, it's common to underestimate the scope of some task, and to pile on extra features/edge cases/etc. until you miss your deadline. A valuable lesson any new programmer/software engineer necessarily goes though.

With "agentic engineering," it's like I'm right back at square one. Code is so cheap/fast to write, I find myself doing it the "right way" from the get go, adding more features even though I know I shouldn't, and ballooning projects until they reach a state of never launching.

I feel like a kid again (:

I spent more time correcting LLMs or agentics systems than just learning the domain and doing the coding myself. I mainly leave LLM to the boring work of doing tedious repetitive code.

If I give it anything resembling anything that I'm not an expert on, it will make a mess of things.

Yeah the old adage "what you put in is what you get out" is highly relevant here.

Admittedly I'm knowledgable in most of the domains I use LLMs for, but even so, my prompts are much longer now than they used to be.

LLMs are token happy, especially Claude, so if you give it a short 1-2 sentence prompt, your results will be wildly variable.

I now spend a lot of mental energy on my prompting, and resist the urge to use less-than-professional language.

Instead of "build me an app to track fitness" it's more like:

> "We're building a companion app for novice barbell users, roughly inspired by the book 'Starting Strength.' The app should be entirely local, with no back-end. We're focusing on iOS, and want to use SwiftUI. Users should [..] Given this high-level description, let's draft a high-level design doc, including implementation decisions, open questions, etc. Before writing any code, we'll review and iterate on this spec."

I've found success in this method for building apps/tools in languages I'm not proficient in (Rust, Swift, etc.).

Yup, it makes me think that the whole bubble/marketing about how AI is going to revolutionize business and managers can just fire or make redundant 80% of their developers because they can replace them with a single Claude subscription to be hyperbolic, and very short sighted. Even from a Business standpoint - most of the cost that is associated with running a business isn't in the people but in the marketing and material cost - developers are probably the least costly part of a business. This is just due to the fact that developer have such a high ROI that it is silly to make the case that your developers are such a significant cost factor for running your business.

That being said, I may get to that stage. How-ever there is still a lot more growing pains to be had with LLM/AI before it reaches that point - if it ever does.

What do you mean doing it the "right way" from the get-go, as then paired with more features, ballooning projects, and never launching?

Is that why it's in quotes because it's the opposite of the right way?

If there's one thing I learned in a decade+ of professional programming, it's that we can't predict the future. That's it, that simple. YANGNI. (also: model the data, but I'm trying to make a point here)

We got into coding because we like to code; we invent reasons and justifications to code more, ship more, all the world's problems can be solved if only developers shipped more code.

Nirvana is reached when they that love and care about the shipping of the code know also that it's not the shipping of the code that matters.

Yeah exactly, "right way" is in quotes because there is no right way.

The most important thing is shipping/getting feedback, everything else is theatre at best, or a project-killing distraction at worst.

As a concrete example, I wanted to update my personal website to show some of these fully-vibecoded projects off. That seemed too simple, so instead I created a Rotten Tomatoes-inspired web app where I could list the projects. Cool, should be an afternoon or two.

A few yak shaves later, and I'm adding automatic repo import[0] from Github...

Totally unnecessary, because I don't actually expect anyone to use the site other than me!

[0]https://github.com/jumploops/slop.haus/pull/9

lol. for whatever reason what came to mind is "it's like alcoholics anonymous". it's so liberating to be self-aware that we have a problem.

I JUST WANT TO CODE!

It gets us all. And it makes us better I think, to care about the craft. LLM people seem split on that. But it's both to me: gotta care about the craft, also as a professional, it's not the code, it's business outcomes. All good. hold two truths.

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