The thing is the code quality is still ultimately up to you
Nothing stopping you from iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write
Nothing stopping you from iterating with the agent till the code is the exact same quality that you yourself would write
I think that’s mostly true, but also I think there is some skill to using agents well. Specifically, work with agents to get a really good product requirements document, then task it out into very narrow user stories / vertical slices (this takes some iterating—the AI really seems to want to think in horizontal layers today), then maybe walk through the code interfaces to be super sure you are aligned. At each step, I make the agent interrogate me thoroughly with every question it can think of, and even if we stop now we will have a system design and tickets that are much higher quality than me thinking alone. I could hand those off to anyone to implement, but I think having an agent TDD their way through the code is the sweet spot.
Whenever the agent is doing something I don’t like (e.g., some coding style thing), I pause and have another agent help me write a style guide that agents must read. This slows me down at first but I think it will pay off in time.
LLMs can't reach the metaphorical. LLMs don't know what true beauty is. I will grant you they have gotten great at the literal and the poetry forms. But it is the beauty that elevates things to my quality bar, and makes a difference between "legacy code" and "innovation" to me.
If you're not seeing this, at best you're probably unable to direct them or use them well.
FWIW, if you don't believe the above, I challenge you to put up a quick git repo, where you are unable to get the deserved quality out, and we can quickly show you how the same quality is available via SOTA agents, within a fraction of hand-coded time.
Depending on the task, it can sometimes be just as arduous to produce enough guidance and guardrails to get the LLM to output exactly what you need that you can trust without issue or extensive review than it is to write it yourself and use the LLM just for ad-hoc generation. It's a constant balance and an endless amount of micro-decisions, honestly, but it's pretty essential to stay engaged and not YOLO with agents the way so many are. Most of my interactions with models these days are done in pseudo-code.
I'll still use 'agents' for throwaway tasks--mostly with local models--including tasks where some sort of ad-hoc code generation is in the critical path (e.g. scraping data).
I use hundreds of millions of tokens a month, and LLMs have completely transformed the way I work. They're also, frankly, pretty mid programmers.
I don't want my code quality, I want AGI code quality - that's what I was promised and jetpacks and flying cars too!
That's what we're spending 7+ TRILLION dollars, destroying ecosystems to build datacenters, and ruining society's social contract on truth and employment for? To build something that produces the average quality of a human, all while making the same types of mistakes along the way?
Sounds like a shit deal, really.
Yeah, but in my experience, it takes the same amount of time or longer to cajole the AI to get it there. I'd rather write it myself and know how it works than insert an LLM as the middleman, especially when it isn't really proving to be any faster.
These articles frustrate me greatly. That said, the author's point about token cost is real, and a risk.
I will admit there are occasional times after iterating so much I’m not sure if I’ve even saved time because going from “it works” to “it’s up to quality” takes so long
So far, it's been pretty underwhelming--on par or slower, and it's definitely more frustrating lol.
Honestly, the only killer feature I found so far is overcoming ADHD activation energy lol. Getting annoyed with the idiot robot screwing up the Terraform migration is apparently a good way to get me to finish a Terraform migration.
And yea usually does for me
If you are coding by hand like the old days you are probably not literally writing everything from scratch anyway, you are copy pasting a bunch of shit off google and stackoverflow or installing open source libraries.
Still very significant savings over all that rather mechanical work. It's ultimately cheaper than doing a code review, and it's faster, because there's less need to manage the emotional state of the person whose code is being reviewed. Maybe I am a slow developer or something, but I am getting a lot of quality changes like that done that before I'd not have, solely because of time spent.
And not increasing the quality just causes problems anyway. Given the same quality, more changes mean more outages than before, just by probability. Increasing rate of change demands a similar increase in quality if you don't want your production support costs to go up. So spending at least a bit of time on quality, letting the LLM do the nagging little things that before you didn't do beause they they took too long and were not a core part of quarterly goals is basically mandatory.