Hacker News Reader

Comment by athrowaway3z | Hacker News Reader

> Is there a better coding agent for me? I’ve only tried Claude, Codex, OpenCode, Cline, and Pi.

I started to gloss over hard after a few paragraphs because I don't really have any the problems you describe anymor; at least not to the point i'd be blogging about them. Instead, I've just been iterating with an agent on various pi extensions that solve the issues.

As with operating systems - you can hold out in the hope somebody solves the right mix of issues in general, and they match your situation well-enough.

That's your choice.

I would note though that being the passive consumer gets you either Mac or Windows UX & prices.

View on HN

Came here to write exactly that. Especially about Pi, which they claim they've used.

Isn't this the point of Pi to implement all the features you need yourself? Complaining about lack of features in Pi doesn't make sense to me, it's their whole identity.

Although I must say that describing specific problems is valuable on its own. It's just (a) why stop there and (b) if stop there, why shape it as a complaint and not as a list of features that are worth discussing.

OP here.

I'm confused how you see this article as a complaint about Pi. I only mention Pi at the very end to say it's one of the agents I've tried. I checked it out, found it too barebones for me and moved on, but I understand why some people prefer it. The existence of Pi isn't a counterargument to, "Why don't agents support development workflows that should be commonplace?"

The point is that pi ticks several of your wishes (e.g. knowing its own capabilities without searching the web). And it's easy to extend. I don't know Typescript, but I just ask Pi to extend itself with feature X, and it does it.

I think knowing its own capabilities is the only thing Pi does out of the box that matches my wishlist.

But I'm still kind of puzzled by this critique. Isn't it kind of like saying, "Why are you complaining about the agent? The C programming language exists, so you can use that to create any agent you want."

I think most people are criticizing your overall stance. Your whole post is "Agents can't do this" and "Agents can't do that."

If I wrote a blog post complaining that "Programming languages don't let me do memory management", would you not think it's fair to respond with "What are you talking about? Have you heard of C?"

> I think most people are criticizing your overall stance. Your whole post is "Agents can't do this" and "Agents can't do that."

My take is that agents don't do the expected thing out of the box. I acknowledge that you can extend some agents and customize them, but I'm saying that it's sort of silly that the features I think most people want don't exist as default, out of the box standards.

> If I wrote a blog post complaining that "Programming languages don't let me do memory management", would you not think it's fair to respond with "What are you talking about? Have you heard of C?"

I don't think that's a fair comparison because C does let you do memory management out of the box. I think the better comparison is like, "Go doesn't let you do pattern matching," and the response is like, "Why don't you just patch Go to let you do pattern matching and maintain your own fork of Go?"

Your analogy is flawed; my critique is at somebody with a printer annoyed they can't get it to print its own instruction manual, so they've drafted one with a pen and are passing it around for feedback.

Why aren't you using the printer?

If you can't use the printer, why do you believe that other people should believe your ideas about the printer are worth listening to?

Feed your blog post to pi - have it implement it - and you will realize pretty quickly that a lot of them are flawed. This would have costs you about the same time as writing this blog post.

I'd rather be reading the blog post that comes after you reflect on what you got wrong and right. Better yet, the blog post after you've iterated enough that you believe your ideas are right.

I don't care for your hand drawn instruction manual on how to use the printer.

> Your analogy is flawed

Can you explain why my analogy is flawed?

> my critique is at somebody with a printer annoyed they can't get it to print its own instruction manual, so they've drafted one with a pen and are passing it around for feedback.

> Why aren't you using the printer?

You've lost me. Didn't you establish that the printer can't print its own instruction manual? How would I use the printer to print the instruction manual when it can't do that? And can you spell out for me how this relates to my critique of agents?

If this is about my gripe that agents have to search online for their docs, that's my most minor grievance because they can still access their docs. I just think it's a dumb time tradeoff that they don't ship docs alongside their binaries because if the docs were locally available, the agents could search them faster and guarantee the docs matched the binary.

> Feed your blog post to pi - have it implement it - and you will realize pretty quickly that a lot of them are flawed. This would have costs you about the same time as writing this blog post.

I never made the claim that Pi could implement these features trivially. If your claim is that Pi can do this so easily, you should be the one feeding my blog to Pi and showing me the results.

I'm confident that Pi could not implement all the features I described in the time I spent on this blog post (about five hours), so I have no reason to waste five hours trying, but if you're confident I'm wrong, you're welcome to spend your own five hours disproving me.

I don't think you want help. I think you just want to rant.

You didn't just give a critique of agents, you made an actual wish list on how to improve them.

You are self-assured enough to think you know better, articulate enough to write down what it ought to do.

I'm stuck because i do not know how to talk to you. I can empathize with people not mentally flexible enough to use these tools that feel stuck. Thinking about workflows is not trivial. I can argue with people who do build their own workflows; about our experiences what works and what doesn't and why.

Your frustratingly falling in between. You obviously have ideas, but you didn't bother to have them meet reality and get refined by it, yet you seem to want others to consider their merit - as though that's a good use of their time.

In the analogy the printer does work.

I'm needling you - since you've claimed my attention to show me your draft of the manual - to turn the damn thing on before we continue discussing the merit of your ideas.

I dont know how long that's going to take you the first time, but once you've found ideas that do survive contact with reality - instead of presuming they will - you can delete the code and absolutely rebuild them from scratch with pi in 5 hours.

Or - if you're happy to - i'll politely bikeshed the color of the title or something and move on.

should be commonplace is clearly subjective. The nice thing about pi is that you can very easily create the development workflows that fit you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com