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Comment by bushido | Hacker News Reader

It's very interesting. I'm very enthusiastic about AI and coding, But I find myself agreeing with the author. Coding is not solved.

Instead, I think what's closer to solved and what we're in the process of solving is product development.

Story: A while ago, I had a few programmers who were really, really fast almost always missed the mark on the assignment wrong. I loved having them on projects because in the time my senior precise engineers could deliver a MVP, the fast engineers would build the wrong thing, collect feedback, reiterate, build the wrong thing, collect feedback, eventually inching closer and closer to a product people would pay for, and it would almost always get delivered faster than my seniors.

I feel AI does the same thing.

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Yeah I have a well established ... well designed codebase that I had before agentic coding and it does support horizental scaling (more services integrations doing more or less the same).

I got lazy around claude fable and astra, and asked them to work in loop (pick specified issue, develop it, qa it ...) have a separate CTO checking on arch.

at the end both models swore that the code is perfect and well designed and nothing is lacking.

I ran the software and it suddenly started writing large amount of data to CSV files instead of the typical DB usage.

AI decided to use csv for testing, and just drifted away. 0 regards to the actual project, 0 regards to common sense.

anecdotal but really weird, the project category is rather standard, I wouldn't accept such a mistake from a junior developer.

Similar experience with a game engine. While working on one isolated component, like the render pipeline, a portion of the backing sparse data buffers were effectively duplicated with a different ABI. It’s like it forgot how to query meshes and game state, then assumed the plumbing didn’t exist so it was all rebuilt from scratch.

It compiled and ran just fine. If you weren’t reviewing the code holistically or keeping tight book keeping of your allocations you would not have noticed. Every single commit in isolation looks perfect. Very eye-opening

yeah the trick is to use them at a slow enough speed that you can keep paying attention, honestly I think I should do 50/50 (with and without AI). but it's funny it feels we all just got busier with AI that I don't feel I can afford half using it.

> Instead, I think what's closer to solved and what we're in the process of solving is product development.

Isn't it the opposite? How to build something is rather solved, but what to build isn't?

>Isn't it the opposite? How to build something is rather solved, but what to build isn't?

But that's not solved in traditional product development either.

Product development an iterative process to get a product fully functional. In 2021, if you ask me what the timeline for a small product/substantial feature, I'd say a few weeks to a month to get a basic MVP, and then another 12 to 18 months to get a feature polished and in a good shape to be stable.

When people put it in the coding frame, what they do it as is saying we've gone from 18 months to minutes or days. That's just not true.

We have gone from eighteen months to depending on the complexity, a 1-4 months.

aside: To be candid though, the compressed time also means the frustrations people experience with a product in 18 months have also been compressed. They still exist, they're all there, they're now just non-stop.

Agile coding

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