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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I use these models day in and day out, on all sorts of tasks. I cannot believe I hear people say that coding is solved.

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Right. It feels like we're living in a parallel world or something. Can agents code? Sure. Can you let them code on their own for a serious production project? Not a chance.

Plenty of serious production projects are doing exactly that. Are you using GPT-6 Astra, or something older?

You and the person you are replying to are talking about different things.

Agents cannot be given a high level goal and then left unsupervised, for hours, without making some dumb decisions.

Right. The only way I'd feel comfortable doing that is if I spent an inordinate amount of time writing very detailed specs, so in terms of labor offset I'm not sure the juice would even be worth the squeeze there. In other words, a sufficiently detailed spec is nearly indistinguishable from code.

What people seem to be wanting is for an agent to infer vast complex data from terse simple data, which I think is probably impossible on a philosophical level. There's real information loss in language, and compute can only make guesses at the end of the day. I really don't see how we bridge that gap.

That's exactly what I meant.

Which serious production projects have AI agents coding on their own? And I’m assuming that means they are routinely taking tasks and deploying them to production autonomously

Astra does exactly the same sort of things that Sol or any of the previous agents do. They duplicate code, overengineer, miss the point, etc.

I was very optimistic about it when it was announced and saw all the demos, but a week later I find it only marginally better (and in some cases worse) than before.

Yeah, Astra, not like it matters. It will gleefully make db queries that perform full table scans instead of adding an index. I need to intuit that that's what's happening and then explicitly instruct it not to be negligently dumb.

Consider that the people who have never have never had to be on-call for a product that results in losses for the company in the event of an outage, and/or have never had to attend an RCA meeting have just as much of a voice in this discussion. Some segments of the software industry don't even have to worry about those sorts of things, and it's easy to get myopic after a while...I doubt that a long time dev at hobbyist-centric wearable manufacturers or audio plugin shops has the same sorts of concerns as someone who has specialized in ad delivery for social media sites.

Allowing only people who have served on call or made concrete contributions to multiple RCAs to have input on the software development process is a wonderful idea!

me too; and my coding agents are slowed down (from developing features) because I require them to refactor the code to be more readable; my code metrics tests force AIs to leverage functional programming and design patterns).

Yes agents can produce code that compiles and runs, but I had to add tools to keep them on track, document their work, follow a process, check their outputs. I also use other AIs to generate developer documentation and review code.

It is like managing a bunch of idiot savant eager-to-please interns, except unlike interns, coding agents do not (yet) learn and improve on their own.

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