munksbeer

> Are you seeing a quality increase? Less customer bugs, less outages, faster resolution? Are you measuring those?

We're not at the stage to measure yet. We may be behind others, not sure. Actually, this isn't quite true. I was interested, so a created an ad-hoc report (with AI) on PRs landed per week over time. This has gone up over the last 6 momths. But that is hard to say why that is. It might just be people are raising smaller PRs because it becomes easy to have the AI split things up, while before, people were too lazy to do this.

Our bottleneck is still that we want humans to review. Sometimes we spot errors, but our pre-existing testing frameworks are very robust already, so if these pass, we're very confident to release to production, and the agent is excellent at understanding the existing testing frameworks and adding to them for new stuff.

So in our team, we don't often see blatant logic errors. It is mostly to do with things like using a pattern that is used elsewhere in the codebase (or not at all) and doesn't belong in our specific section of the code (we have a large monorepo). These become fewer as we enhance our ruleset (AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md) for our particular developers.

> It’s on you to prove that this big “if” can be realized. A -> B only matters when A is true

Not really. This is a discussion about what code looks like if AI can write applications that are as good, stable, correct as humans.

I think they can, better than most programmers at the moment, with the correct guardrails and supervision. But in time, I think we may not need to review the code at all, but instead verify correctness and performance only. The AI can write the code however it likes.

Obviously I don't have a proof for this, but based on the progress I've seen so far, if someone forced me to bet one way or the other, this is what I'd bet on.

>Reading is hard I guess. I'm saying Brexit was not sold as being positive for the economy.

This is a lie. Provably so. Exhibit the other post replying to you.

But this is not unexpected, the entire brexit campaign was one lie after another, and the supporters lied about it continually too.

For much hilarity, read this. I still laugh each time:

https://www.reaction.life/p/britain-looks-like-brexit

Exactly. Quality of code is a programming invention to make it easier to write and maintain correctly functioning applications.

That is the entire purpose of "quality of code".

If the end user experiences a correctly performing application, now, and in the future, they don't care at all what the code looks like.

AIs could resort to a single global array of primitives and forget all about functions, and just use gotos if it helped them (it probably doesn't).

The point is, if road engineers changed their process and materials, and to you it felt like driving on the same road, with the same wear and tear and potholes, you wouldn't even notice.

If AIs can generate code that looks ridiculous to humans but over time has the correct performance, the correct behaviour, no-one outside of software engineers will know or care.

I think a lot of us have stopped talking to each other about this. I see it the other way round to you. I see constant scepticism and doubt that LLMs can build anything useful, and whenever provided with examples, the goalposts just move.

And at my own firm, I think every developer is generating most of their code using agentic coding. We're still sceptical enough that we are doing the usual heavy handed human review process, so we're not seeing a huge speed up in delivery times, but we are seeing a volume increase. That is because writing the changes and raising the PRs is much faster, but also a lot of boring admin and support work is now mostly done by LLMs. Reports of instability, vague client requests, etc? Throw the LLM at them and it usually figure it out why I continue to engineer.

So I know, first hand, that these things are very good. I also know second and third hand that pretty much every fintech in the industry is as heavily using agentic coding as we are.

And then I come to HN or reddit and I see people telling us that they cannot write decent production code, and this is just wrong. This isn't opinion wrong, it is objectively wrong. Any fintech that wants to keep up will tell you this.

I can't speak for other industries but I can't imagine they're different.

So, I'm not sure what to conclude from this. I don't want to be uncharitable, but when HN/reddit posts just don't match the reality I see for myself, I have no choice but to categorise them as being emotionally driven to stick to a particular narrative, and so I can dismiss them.

I enjoyed hearing about the stuff you've done.

Would you mind talking about your experience making the 2 godot games? Which agent and model did you use? I've been wanting to dabble here and interested to hear stories.

I haven't fact checked anything here, I took the $7 million at face value. If he is generating that amount of money from his content creation, then I think my statement makes sense, right?

I don't wacth/read his content at all because I find AI-doomers really boring and tiresome.

The reason is obviously that engagement drives his revenue, and correctness or facts have nothing to do with it. Everyone knows that content creators will maximise engagement, and clearly he has found an audience who are seeking out a certain narrative, and will write to that narrative to generate revenue.

> As someone who's pro-EU, I'd also really like to see major reforms within the organization.

What would your reformed EU look like?

> the EU effectively constitutes a relinquishment of sovereignty

Agreed, it is pooling sovereignty. The UK already does that with a union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Pooling sovereignty is often regarded as a benefit on the whole.

This comment is nonsense, and it is the usual propaganda based on an ideological bent. I'm sorry but I think you and your family have retained the class/caste based system of you original homeland and it is just manifesting in a weird way.

I am willing to bet your mother never encountered anything of the sort. Most of the old very rough areas in London are now gentrified (people complain about it). You can pretty much walk around anywhere in London, at night, without any issues. Phone snatching is the major problem, but general crime, violent crime, ghettoism, etc are all down since 2000.

I know this, because I am an immigrant from a 3rd world country, have lived in London for 25+ years. And the stats show it too.

Your post really makes me angry.

> I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs.

What do you mean by "vibe engineering"?

It really depends on what you mean by this on how people can agree or disagree with you.

My guess is that in any sense that you mean it, you're almost certainly wrong. AI coding and engineering will continue to improve until any developer who refuses to use it will be unemployable at corporate gigs, and outcompeted even in freelance stuff.

That is only pension funds. By far the largest indirect holds of US stock are households, via retirement accounts, mutual finds, ETFs, etc.

Yes, I agree, wealth inequality is massively skewed. But that is a different argument. In the end, if productivity increases and share prices go up, you and I are share holders (I presume you're saving for retirement), and we benefit. As does virtually every other person saving for retirement in the market.

Again, inequality is real, and is going to have to be addressed, but it is not the argument here.

No, it really doesn't. I think you're quite mistaken. Ultimately, most shares are held in funds which are pension or other personal wealth funds, and those are held by billions of ordinary people.

> You've been told a lie. Productivity has increased every step of the way even as populations shrink and the elderly cohort grows. Most of those productivity gains, i.e. the added value produced by each worker, has gone to shareholders' profits.

You mean our pension funds?

An business over a certain size will want people that are "responsible" or in other words liable for software issues.

>Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life.

I have the same sentiment. So far, no indication that I can be replaced yet. Maybe some day, but right now I'm more productive because of AI (*), but just as if not more busy.

(*) Such as: Obviously the coding side, but also...

AI is helping scrape logs to diagnose bugs, and doing so with high accuracy, much, much faster than I could have done.

AI is taking care of my work journal (basically how I manage my own state) by scraping slack, emails, git commits, ticket state changes and everything else, and updating and maintaining my journal each day. I can't overstate how pleased I am with this. I am usually pretty diligent but if I get out of the habit, I could go weeks before I was back in. Now it is trivial and I always do it.

And more.

Directed at the team working on gemini it seems. I'd work 60 hours a week for the compensation they're getting, without hesitation. I already work close to that for far less.

Very nice! Do you have any CLAUDE.md or AGENT.md files that influence it? I'd like to try this same thing and wondering what else feeds into it to produce that output?

> It is cold for me to not want to concede everything to billionaires to cure a disease?

That's a fallacy. You're assuming we all agree that this is going to happen. I don't agree. And I think AI will drive a huge amount of innovation that is going to make almost everyones lives better.

These threads are so tiresome. Reddit doomerism has infested hn.

He would have probably worked 12+ hours a day, his children could have died of a toenail infection, their teeth would be falling out early, they could have been deformed by various diseases, many children died young or at birth, etc, etc.

I would never choose to raise a family in that period.

Yes. Choose a time and country in history where you would like to be raising a family now as a "median person"? I bet it is within the last 50 years, and specifically in one of the developed nations and probably during the 1970-2000 period. People rarely would choose to go back further.

>AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human.

You don't know that. And this same line could be said about any technology that results in accruing of capital, but actually does end up making life better for the average human.

What if AI at AlphaFold finds a cure for Alzheimer's disease? What if it finds a way to actually perfect fusion?

You can't tell me we don't live better lives than people 100 years ago right now, and that is because of technology.

You can't be serious. It couldn't be more obvious what the poster was referring to, a drive by put-down comment with no attempt to discuss anything seriously is more highly upvoted than an objection to such a comment.

What is this place for? Dang tells us, curious discussion. The guidelines explicitly state that certain comments are not in the spirit.

But the community seems to have decided otherwise, which is a shame.

I think the general population earning median wages will have very little sympathy for first world software engineers earning vast amounts of money.

What are you going to tell them? Suddenly you're earning what they're earning for sitting at a desk every day?

I don't think HN is libertarian at all. In fact, I can barely tell the difference between reddit and HN now. Anti-capitalism is the dominant sentiment here now.

I must be doing something very different from the anti-AI people on here. It is ridiculously empowering.

Got an issue in production? Give your agent the knowledge of how to locate the logs, and where the codebase is, and ask it to diagnose, and off it goes. It almost always finds the issue, and while it has been doing that, I've been able to get on with more productive things.

In terms of coding, if you work on it, and give it the correct guidelines, guardrails and ability to check its own work, it produces very high quality results.

The worst part is in such a short space of time I just don't think I can ever back to normal coding. I don't mind that, but it sucks when I'm offline.

I honestly don't know what people are doing wrong, or what sort of code they're writing that they can't get an AI to work well for them.

For who?