[HN Gopher] Just talk to it - A way of agentic engineering
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Just talk to it - A way of agentic engineering
Author : freediver
Score : 162 points
Date : 2025-10-15 06:21 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (steipete.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (steipete.me)
| squirrel wrote:
| I have to imagine that like pair programming, this multi-AI
| approach would be significantly more tiring than one-window, one-
| programmer coding. Do you have to force yourself to take breaks
| to keep up your stamina?
| throw-10-13 wrote:
| The human context window is the limiting factor.
|
| That and testing/reviewing the insane amounts of ai slop this
| method generates.
| csar wrote:
| If you're getting AI slop you're doing it wrong. You should
| be getting high quality code. Of course that's easier said
| than done, but AI slop is a sign that things have gone off
| the rails.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| Well I don't use as many instances as they do, but using codex
| for example will take some time researching the code. It mostly
| just becomes a practice so that I don't have to wait for the
| model, I just context switch to a different one. It probably
| helps that I am ADHD, I don't pay much of a cost to ping pong
| around.
|
| So I might tell one to look back in the git history to when
| something was removed and add it back into a class. So it will
| figure out what commit added it, what removed it, and then add
| the code back in.
|
| While that terminal is doing that, on another I can kick off
| another agent to make some fixes for something else that I need
| to knock out in another project.
|
| I just ping pong back to the first window to look at the code
| and tell it to add a new unit test for the new possible state
| inside the class it modified and I'm done.
|
| I may also periodically while working have a question about a
| best practice or something that I'll kick off in browser and
| leave it running to read later.
|
| This is not draining, and I keep a flow because I'm not sitting
| and waiting on something, they are waiting on me to context
| switch back.
| philipp-gayret wrote:
| > But Claude Code now has Plugins
|
| > Do you hear that noise in the distance? It's me sigh-ing. (...)
| Yes, maintaining good documents for specific tasks is a good
| idea. I keep a big list of useful docs in a docs folder as
| markdown.
|
| I'm not that familiar with Claude Code Plugins, but it looks like
| it allows integrations with Hooks, which is a lot more powerful
| than just giving more context. Context is one thing, but Hooks
| let you codify guardrails. For example where I work we have a
| setup for Claude Code that guides it through common processes,
| like how to work with Terraform, Git or manage dependencies and
| the whitelisting or recommendation towards dependencies. You
| can't guarantee this just by slapping on more context. With Hooks
| you can both auto-approve or auto-deny _and_ give back guidance
| when doing so, for me this is a killer feature of Claude Code
| that lets it act more intelligently without having to rely on it
| following context or polluting the context window.
|
| Cursor recently added a feature much like Claude Code's hooks, I
| hope to see it in Codex too.
| hansmayer wrote:
| So, just trying to understand this - he admits to code being slop
| and in the same sentences states that agents (which created the
| slop in the first place) also refactor it? Where is the logic in
| that?
| grim_io wrote:
| He, who does not produce slop in the first iteration, cast the
| first stone.
| fhd2 wrote:
| I feel in this context, refactoring has lost its meaning a bit.
| Sure, it's often used analogous to changes that don't affect
| semantics. But originally, the idea was that you make a quick
| change to solve the problem / test the idea, and then spend
| some time on properly integrating the changes in the existing
| system.
|
| LLMs struggle with simplicity in my experience, so they
| struggle with the first step. They also lack the sort of
| intelligence required to understand (let alone evolve) the
| system's design, so they will struggle with the second step as
| well.
|
| So maybe what's meant here is not refactoring in the original
| meaning, but rather "cleanup". You can do it in the original
| way with LLMs, but that means you'll have to be incredibly
| micro manage-y, in my experience. Any sort of vibe coding
| doesn't lead to anything I'd call refactoring.
| ImaCake wrote:
| > LLMs struggle with simplicity in my experience
|
| I think a lot of this is because people (and thus LLMs) use
| verbosity as a signal for effort. It's a very bad signal,
| especially for software, but its a very popular signal. Most
| writing is much longer than it needs to be, everything from
| SEO website recipes, consulting reports, and non-fiction
| books. Both the author and the readers are often fooled into
| thinking lots of words are good.
|
| It's probably hard to train that out of an LLM, especially if
| they see how that verbosity impressess the people making the
| purchasing decisions.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I think a lot of this is because people (and thus LLMs)
| use verbosity as a signal for effort.
|
| It's also one of the main use-cases for non-programmer use
| of the models, so there are business-forces against toning
| it down. Ex: "Make a funny birthday letter for my sister
| Suzie who's turning 50."
| sebstefan wrote:
| "So, just trying to understand this - he admits to code being
| buggy and in the same sentences states that he (the engineer
| who created the bugs in the first place) also debugs it? Where
| is the logic in that?"
| hansmayer wrote:
| Are you seriously comparing outputs of human intelligence to
| a text generator ?
| sebstefan wrote:
| No I'm highlighting that the logic itself is stupid
|
| If the point is that you can't solve with AI what you
| messed up with AI, but with human intelligence spending a
| bit more time on the problem does indeed tend to help, you
| need to explain why his technique with the AI won't work
| either.
|
| Plus he's adding human input to it every time, so I see no
| reason to default to "it wouldn't work".
| hansmayer wrote:
| Well you said it yourself, you are literally comparing
| human intelligence with the so-called AI, or better said,
| advanced text generator. The differentiator being, the
| text generators have 0 intelligence, otherwise there
| would not be a flood of AI gurus explaining the latest
| trick to making them finally work.
| cwyers wrote:
| LLMs are good at pursuing objectives, but they aren't
| necessarily good at juggling competing objectives at once. So
| you can picture doing the following, for instance:
|
| - "Here is a spec for an API endpoint. Implement this spec."
|
| - "Using these tools, refactor the codebase. Make sure that you
| are passing all tests from (dead code checker, cyclomatic
| complexity checker, etc.)"
|
| The clankers are very good at iteratively moving towards a
| defined objective (it's how they were post-trained), so you can
| get them to do basically anything you can define an objective
| for, as long as you can chunk it up in a way that it fits in
| their usable context window.
| barrkel wrote:
| It all sounds somewhat impressive (300k lines written and
| maintained by AI) but it's hard to judge how well the experience
| transfers without seeing the code and understanding the feature
| set.
|
| For example, I have some code which is a series of integrations
| with APIs and some data entry and web UI controls. AI does a
| great job, it's all pretty shallow. The more known the APIs, the
| better able AI is to fly through that stuff.
|
| I have other code which is well factored and a single class does
| a single thing and AI can make changes just fine.
|
| I have another chunk of code, a query language, with a tokenizer,
| parser, syntax tree, some optimizations, and it eventually
| constructs SQL. Making changes requires a lot of thought from
| multiple angles and I could not safely give a vague prompt and
| expect good results. Common patterns need to fall into optimized
| paths, and new constructs need consideration about how they're
| going to perform, and how their syntax is going to interact with
| other syntax. You need awareness not just of the language but
| also the schema and how the database optimizes based on the data
| distribution. AI can tinker around the edges but I can't trust it
| to make any interesting changes.
| timr wrote:
| On the contrary, this doesn't sound impressive at all. It
| sounds like a cowboy coder working on relatively small
| projects.
|
| 300k LOC is not particularly large, and this person's writing
| and thinking (and stated workflow) is so scattered that I'm
| basically 100% certain that it's a mess. I'm using all of the
| same models, the same tools, etc., and (importantly) _reading
| all of the code_ , and I have 0% faith in any of these models
| to operate autonomously. Also, my opinion on the quality of
| GPT-5 vs Claude vs other models is wildly different.
|
| There's a huge disconnect between my own experience and what
| this person claims to be doing, and I strongly suspect that the
| difference is that I'm paying attention and routinely disgusted
| by what I see.
| sarchertech wrote:
| 300k especially isn't impressive if it should have been 10k.
| timr wrote:
| Yes, well put. And that's a common failure mode.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I would guess that roughly 0.000087% devs on the planet do
| it in 10k (if it is possible) and 37.76% would do it in
| 876k so 300k is probably right in some middle :)
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| To be fair, codebases are bimodal, and 300k is large for the
| smaller part of the distribution. Large enterprise codebases
| tend to be monorepos, have a ton of generated code and a lot
| of duplicated functionality for different environments, so
| the 10-100 million line claims need to be taken with a grain
| of salt, a lot of the sub projects in them are well below
| 300k even if you pull in defs.
| myko wrote:
| I'm fairly skeptical of the LLM craze but I deeply respect
| Peter Steinberger's work over the years, he truly is a gifted
| software developer in his own right. I'm sure his personal
| expertise helps him guide these tools better than many could.
| steipete wrote:
| (OP) 1/3rd of the code is tests.
|
| There's an Expo app, two Tauri apps, a cli, a chrome
| extension. The admin part to help debug and test features is
| EXTREMELY detailed and around 40k LOC alone.
|
| To give some perspective to that number.
| ljm wrote:
| AI agents to me seem maximalist by default, and if it takes 250
| lines to meet a requirement they would choose that over the
| much simpler one-line change.
|
| In an existing codebase this is easily solved by making your
| prompt more specific, possibly so specific you are just
| describing the actual changes to make. Even then I find myself
| asking for refinements that simplify the approach, with
| suggestions for what I know would work better. The only reason
| I'm not writing the change myself is because the AI agent is
| running a TDD-style red/green/refactor loop and can say stuff
| like "this is an integration test, don't use mocks and prefer
| to use relevant rspec matchers in favour of asserting on
| internal object state" and it will fix every test in the diff.
|
| In a brand new codebase I don't have a baseline any more and
| it's just an AI adding more and more into a ball of mud. I'm
| doing this with NixOS and the only thing keeping it sane is
| that each generated file is quite small and simple (owing to
| the language being declarative). Yet still, I have zero idea if
| I can even deploy it yet as a result.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I stopped using AI assistance when I realized every time the
| agent made a change, I had to go behind and simplify it by
| about 80%. It's easier, faster, more fun, and produces a
| better end product if I just go ahead and do it myself.
|
| If I am feeling lazy I can have one of the chats give me
| their shit solution to the micro problem at hand and extract
| the line I need and integrate it properly. This is usually a
| little faster than reading the manual, but it's wrong often
| enough that I usually read the manual for everything the bot
| does, to make sure. And so next time I can skip asking it.
|
| Someone wake me up and tell me to try these tools again when
| the flow isn't prompting and deleting and repeat.
|
| inb4 someone tells me there's a learning curve for this human
| language product that is supposed to make it so I'm obsolete
| and my CEO can do my job because it makes coding so easy that
| even an experienced coder has to climb a steep learning curve
| but there's going to be a white collar blood bath also
|
| fucking pick a narrative, AI shills
| srameshc wrote:
| Everytime I read something like this, I question myself, what I
| am doing wrong ? And I tried all kinds of AI tools. But I am not
| even close to claiming that AI writes 50% of my code. My work
| which sometimes include feature enhancements and maintenance is
| where I get even less. I have to be extremely careful and make
| sure nothing unwanted or addition that I am unaware of has been
| added. Maybe it's me and I am not good yet to get to 100% AI code
| generation.
| fhennig wrote:
| I'm in the same boat, I still find the model to make mistakes
| or solve things in a less than ideal way - maybe the future is
| to just not care - but for now I want to maintain the level of
| quality that the codebase currently has.
|
| I think it's good to keep up with what early adopters are
| doing, but I'm not too fussed about missing something. The
| plugins is a good example: A few weeks ago there was a post on
| HN where someone said they are using 18 or 25 or whatever
| plugins and it's the future, now this person says they are
| using none. I'm still waiting for the dust to settle, I'm not
| in a rush.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The person using 25 plugins is giving bad advice. The agent
| isn't going to need all those tools at once, and each tool
| burns context and causes tool confusion. Enable MCPs for the
| specific task you're going to have your agent do.
|
| The trick is to create deterministic hurdles the LLM has to
| jump over. Tests, linting, benchmarks, etc. You can even do
| this with diff size to enforce simpler code, tell an agent to
| develop a feature and keep the character count of the diff
| below some threshold, and it'll iterate on pruning the
| solution.
| troupo wrote:
| You're not doing anything wrong. You have to read past
| hyperbole.
|
| Here's how the article starts: "Agentic engineering has become
| so good that it now writes pretty much 100% of my code. And yet
| I see so many folks trying to solve issues and generating these
| elaborated charades instead of getting sh*t done."
|
| Here's how it continues:
|
| - I run between 3-8 in parallel
|
| - My agents do git atomic commits, I iterated a lot on the
| agents file:
| https://gist.github.com/steipete/d3b9db3fa8eb1d1a692b7656217...
|
| - I currently have 4 OpenAI subs and 1 Anthropic sub, so my
| overall costs are around 1k/month for basically unlimited
| tokens.
|
| - My current approach is usually that I start a discussion with
| codex, I paste in some websites, some ideas, ask it to read
| code, and we flesh out a new feature together.
|
| - If you do a bigger refactor, codex often stops with a mid-
| work reply. Queue up continue messages if you wanna go away and
| just see it done
|
| - When things get hard, prompting and adding some trigger words
| like "take your time" "comprehensive" "read all code that could
| be related" "create possible hypothesis" makes codex solve even
| the trickiest problems.
|
| - My Agent file is currently ~800 lines long and feels like a
| collection of organizational scar tissue. I didn't write it,
| codex did.
|
| It's the same magical incantations and elaborated charades as
| everyone does. The "the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering" is
| full of bs and has nothing concrete except a single link to a
| bunch of incantations for agents. No idea what his actual
| "website + tauri app + mobile app" is that he build 100% with
| AI, but depending on actual functionality, after burning $1000
| a month on tokens you may actually have a fully functioning app
| in React + Typescript with little human supervision.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > $1000 a month
|
| Yeah at this point you could hire a software developer.
| TheMrZZ wrote:
| I don't know how much SWE get paid in your area, but I sure
| hope it's not 1000$/month.
|
| Though I'm aligned that I don't (yet) believe in this "AI
| writes all my code for me" statements.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| It includes that with AI you still need someone to work.
| First to query the AI and then to fix up something and to
| bring it in a form you can release and use.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| $5.75/hr is well below outsourced rates. It's $1.40/hr if
| the agent runs without stopping. If I hired a human
| consultant for a project of any size, I could easily spend
| $10,000 or more on just scoping and contract approval.
| Humans don't win on cost.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Right now they still need someone typing prompts and
| verifying them. When they do what you intend it means
| that is no longer more work to handhold them than doing
| it yourself, but it is still work.
| steipete wrote:
| (OP) You know if I link to a half-finished project, people
| would take it apart as many don't understand the nuance
| between crap and simply not done yet. But if you follow me on
| twitter it'll take you a few minutes to figure out. I'm two
| months in, even with AI, shipping good stuff takes time.
| tptacek wrote:
| Same! Half would be a lot for me. I'm also not close to the
| point where I'm comfortable merging LLM-authored PRs without
| line-by-line reviews.
| darkwater wrote:
| Didn't you write a blog post a few months ago saying that you
| had agents preparing PRs for you while AFK doing things IRL?
| Your outlook back then seemed pretty optimistic, while this
| comment now seems way less so. Did something change for you
| or had I misunderstood your post back then?
| tptacek wrote:
| I still have agents (Sketch.dev mostly) produce PRs offline
| for me! I'm very optimistic. This is the second most
| important thing to have happened in my career (#1: the
| Internet; #3: mobile; #4: not writing everything in C).
| Nothing has changed. But yeah, I still line-by-line audit
| everything the agent spits out, and I still take the wheel
| myself about half the time. If everything stopped right
| here and no further progress was made on any of this
| technology and my workflow remained the same, this would
| remain the second most important thing.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I have to be extremely careful and make sure nothing unwanted
| or addition that I am unaware of has been added.
|
| I've started getting desperate to the point of saying 1)
| "never. never, ever add or remove features without consulting
| me first and getting approval." Then eventually, 2) appended to
| the previous "The last rule is the most important rule, because
| you keep doing it and I need you to stop doing it." Then
| finally 3), "THE LAST RULE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE, BECAUSE
| YOU KEEP DOING IT AND I NEED YOU TO STOP DOING IT."
|
| 3/4 of my AI bugs are the AI making changes to the
| functionality of the code when I'm not looking, or repeatedly
| reinserting bugs that had been previously removed. The most
| valuable thing I'm getting it to do is to refactor the code it
| already wrote into shorter well-named functions (during which
| it still inevitably adds and removes behavior), because it
| means that I can just debug by hand and stop demanding over and
| over again that it not ignore what I said.
|
| But, of course, it's not ignoring me, it's not thinking at all.
| Trying to look for the magic words to keep it from ignoring me
| and lying about it is just an illusion of control. The thing
| that will knock it off it's dumb track is likely just a lucky
| random seed during the 13th attempt. Then, like a sports fan, I
| add the lucky underwear to my instructions.
|
| edit: the "I'll get AI to write the AI prompt so it will be
| perfect" stuff is so much voodoo. LLMs have no special insight
| into what will make LLMs work correctly. I probably should have
| stopped that last sentence after the word "insight." Feed them
| a sample prompt that you say doesn't work, and it will explain
| to you exactly why it's so bad, and could never work. Feed them
| the same prompt and ask why it works so well, and it will tell
| you how perfectly crafted it is and why. Then it will offer to
| tell you how it could be improved.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Hrrrm, do you write unit tests to check for the desired
| behaviour? Or does it 'optimize' those away too? %-/
| sarchertech wrote:
| Another person building zero stakes tools for AI coding. 300k LOC
| also isn't impressive if it should have been 10k.
| N_Lens wrote:
| I'm currently satisfied with Claude Code, but this article seems
| to sing the praises of Codex. I am dubious Whether it's actually
| superior or it's 'organic marketing' by OAI (Given that they
| undoubtedly do this, and other shady practices).
|
| I'll give codex a try later to compare.
| esafak wrote:
| Codex is about as capable as Sonnet, but slower. One advantage
| is that it more readily pushes back against requests, like the
| article noted.
| lysecret wrote:
| This is very funny to me I rarely found this pushback to be
| useful and mostly very annoying. Claude code has the opposite
| problem sometimes though. To some extend this ends up being a
| pure preference of character. You want ur ai coder to be
| disagreeable or agreeable. Maybe this is a good way to
| differentiate.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| I've found codex to be a much more thorough code reviewer.
|
| Recently I've been using Claude for code gen and codex for
| review.
|
| I keep trying to use Gemini as it is so fast, but it is far
| inferior in every other way in my experience.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Use of the bell curve for this meme considered harmful.
|
| If you're going to use AI like that, it's not a clear win over
| writing the code yourself (unless you're a mid programmer). The
| whole point of AI is to automate shit, but you've planted a flag
| on the minimal level of automation you're comfortable with and
| proclaimed a pareto frontier that doesn't exist.
| mherrmann wrote:
| I use Claude Code every day and find that it still requires a lot
| of hand-holding. Maybe codex is better. But just in my last
| session today, Claude wrote 100 lines of test code that could
| have been 20, and 30 lines of production code that could have
| been 5. I'm glad I do not have to maintain 300 kloc of 100% AI-
| generated code. But at the end of the day, what counts is
| velocity and quality, and it seems OP is happy. The tools
| certainly are useful.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Have any of these no-bs articles described how they handle schema
| changes? Are they even using a "real" DB or is it all local,
| single user sqllite? Because I can see a disaster looming letting
| a vibe coder's agent loose on a database.
|
| And does it require auth? How is that spec'd out and validated?
| What about RBAC or anything? How would you even get the LLM to
| constantly follow rules for that?
|
| Don't get me wrong these tools are pretty cool but the old adage
| "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" always
| applies.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Senior engineers know process, including for what you
| described, and that maps to plan-driven AI engineering well:
|
| 1. Note the discussion of plan-driven development in the claude
| code sections (think: plan = granular task list, including
| goals & validation criteria, that the agent loops over and
| self-modifies). Plans are typically AI generated: I ask it to
| do initial steps of researching current patterns for x+y+z and
| include those in the steps and validations, and even have it
| re-audit a plan. Codex internally works the same, and multiple
| people are reporting it automates more of this plan flow.
|
| 2. Working with database for tasks like migrations is normal
| and even better. My two UIs are now the agent CLI (basically
| streaming AI chat for task list monitoring & editing) and
| GitHub PR viewer: if it wasn't smart enough to add and test
| migrations and you didn't put that into the plan, you see it in
| the PR review and tell it to fix that. Writing migrations is
| easy, but testing them is annoying, and I've found AI helping
| write mocks, integration tests, etc to be wonderful.
| steipete wrote:
| (OP) I use atlas for database migrations, it works quite well
| with agents and has plenty guardrails around it.
| pqdbr wrote:
| One more article praising Codex CLI over Claude Code. Decided to
| give it a try this morning.
|
| A simple task that would have taken literally no more than 2
| minutes in Claude Code is, as of now, 9m+ and still "inspecting
| specific directory", with an ever increasing list of read files,
| not a single line of code written.
|
| I might be holding it wrong.
| kendallchuang wrote:
| What I understand is Codex takes more time to gather context to
| make the relevant changes; with more context it may give a more
| precise response than Claude Code.
| pqdbr wrote:
| With Claude Code, I can 'tune' the prompt by feeling how much
| context the model needs to perform it's task. I can mention
| more files or tell it to read more code as needed.
|
| With one hour of experience of Codex CLI, every single prompt
| - even the most simple ones - are 5+ minutes of investigation
| before anything gets done. Unbearable and totally
| unnecessary.
| esafak wrote:
| It has the same context. It does not take that long to ingest
| a bunch of files. OpenAI is just not offering the same level
| of performance, probably due to oversubscription.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I'm not making any psychiatric diagnoses based on GitHub repos or
| YouTube videos.
|
| But. Sometimes when I see someone talking about cranking out
| hundreds of thousands of lines of vibe coded apps, I go watch
| their YouTube videos, or checkout their dozens of unconnected,
| half finished repos.
|
| Every single time I get a serious manic vibe.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| The overlap between crypto hustlers and AI hustlers is pretty
| interesting. Not strictly "hustle both" type overlap but it's a
| similar type of energy. Bully the non-believers and hype the
| hype regardless of reality.
|
| I dunno. People say these tools trigger the gambling part of
| your brain. I think there is a lot of merit to that. When these
| tools work (which they absolutely do) it's incredible and your
| brain gets a nice hit of dopamine but holy cow can these tools
| fail. But if you just keep pulling that lever, keep adding "the
| right" context and keep casting the right "spells" the AI will
| perform its magic again and you'll get your next fix. Just keep
| at it. Eventually you'll get it.
|
| Surely somebody somewhere is doing brain imagery when using
| these tools. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same parts of
| the brain light up as when you play something like Candy Crush.
| Dig deep into the sunk cost fallacy, pepper with an illusion of
| control and that glorious "I'm on a roll" feeling (how many
| agents did this dude have active at once?) and boom...
|
| I mean read the post. The dude spends $1000/mo plugging tokens
| into a grid of 8 parallel agents. They have a term for this in
| the gaming industry. It's a whale.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Layer on the parasocial angle and it gets even worse: You're
| gambling _and_ you have a "friend."
| handfuloflight wrote:
| You're describing the classic developer dopamine loop, just
| faster now.
|
| Spinning up test after test, tweaking parameters, chasing
| that "it works!" high, that's what debugging has always been.
|
| You're doing the exact same thing with your code that you're
| criticizing him for doing with AI. Same sunk cost fallacy
| ("I've already spent 3 hours, might as well get it working"),
| same illusion of control, same "I'm on a roll" feeling when
| the tests finally pass.
|
| The only difference is speed. He gets micro-hits every 10
| seconds watching tokens stream. You get them every time you
| re-run your test suite. Same gambling structure, same reward
| circuit lighting up, you've just normalized yours because it
| happened slowly enough to not look like a slot machine.
|
| And you're the one reducing it to "gambling" unless you're
| claiming human developers experience zero dopamine and write
| code with omniscient correctness the first time. If they
| don't, if there's iteration, failure, reward, then you're
| describing the same neurochemistry. You've just decided it
| only counts as "gambling" when it makes you uncomfortable.
| hitarpetar wrote:
| running and slots are both addictive, so they must be
| equally bad for you right?
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| Well, to be fair there were a lot of guys doing exactly this
| sort of thing except they were writing their hobby projects by
| hand. I don't take any technical blogs about someone's secret
| sauce seriously at all. Programmer blogs are marketing pieces.
| steipete wrote:
| Marketing for what? I didn't even link to what I'm building
| because I wanna ship it when it's ready.
| darkwater wrote:
| In this post they mentioned "blast radius" and said "I didn't
| invent the term but I like it though". Maybe it's just because
| I'm very well used to the term in our industry, but that
| sentence felt so off for me. Cringe vibes.
| bigblind wrote:
| I'd love to be able to watch people work, who say that they're
| sucessful with these tools. If there are any devs live streaming
| software development on Twitch, or just making screen casts
| (without too many cuts) of how they use these tools in day-to-day
| work, I'd love to see it.
| simonw wrote:
| Armin Ronacher has done some of those:
| https://www.youtube.com/@ArminRonacher
| maqnius wrote:
| I skimmed through one of the videos and it reminded me of how
| I just had a week of mainly reviewing other's code and
| supporting their work.
|
| When I finally had the occasion to code myself, I felt so
| much better and less stressed at the end of the day.
|
| My point is: what I just saw is hopefully not my future.
|
| I sometimes read the opinion, that those who like the
| programming part of software engineering, don't like
| ,,agentic engineering" and vica versa. But can we really
| assume that Armin Ronacher doesn't like programming?
| simonw wrote:
| It's easy to find counter-examples to that idea that people
| who like working with coding agents don't enjoy
| programming. I'm one of those people - I'm enjoying myself
| _so much_ getting agents to build stuff for me, and I 've
| enjoyed the craft of programming for 25+ years. I'm doing
| what I did before, just faster and with less time spent on
| the frustrating, repetitive bits.
| esafak wrote:
| Same here. I like debating the architecture, API, schema,
| algorithms, data structures, and user experience. Once
| all that is done, I hand off the implementation.
| bdangubic wrote:
| sooooo much this. I am in the same 25+ (almost 30) and
| more and more thinking that there is _something_ there
| that us "veterans" dig this so much. perhaps it is the
| discipline we have built over the years that is being
| applied religiously with agents...
| lysecret wrote:
| +1 for him he got me into agentic coding earlier this year.
| jrk wrote:
| If you go just a few posts back in Peter's own blog he has a
| video of himself doing exactly this:
|
| https://steipete.me/posts/2025/live-coding-session-building-...
|
| He has posted others over the past few months, but they don't
| seem to be on his blog currently.
|
| As @simonw mentions in a peer comment, Armin Ronacher also has
| several great streams (and he's less caffeinated and frenetic
| than Peter :)
| FitchApps wrote:
| My 2c - AI-first is awesome for rapid prototyping / POC but
| beyond that the devs should own the project and use AI
| sparingly. I'm not saying AI agents aren't capable, I'm saying
| that your skills will shift from problem solving/coding to
| managing AI and whatever code it produces
| jasondjk wrote:
| I recorded a bunch of videos like this for Ruby on Rails. This
| one is generically relevant about operating Claude hands free
| with --dangerously-skip-permissions and importantly sandboxing
| it in a separate user account for security:
| https://insidertrades.directory/built-with-rails/claude-code...
| aredox wrote:
| >With Claude Code I often have multi-second freezes and it's
| process blows up to gigabytes of memory.
|
| I am in a mood where I find it excessively funny that, all that
| talk about AI, agents, billions of dollars, tera-watts/-hours
| spent, and people still manage to publish posts with the
| "its/it's" mistake.
|
| (I am not a native English speaker, so I notice it at a higher
| rate than people who learned English "by ear".)
|
| Maybe you don't care or you find it annoying to have it pointed
| out, but it says something about fundamentals. You know, "The way
| you do one thing is the way you do all things".
| WA wrote:
| I get what you're saying. "they're" and "their" is also a
| classic that many non-natives seem to get right, but native
| speakers have trouble with.
|
| But OP isn't native either. He's Austrian.
| Izkata wrote:
| As a native speaker, for a very long time I didn't understand
| why "its" existed, and saw "it's" as parallel to "aredox's" -
| apostophe-s being either ownership or contraction depending on
| context (made even more confusing because "s" without an
| apostrophe is pluralization with other words). Somehow it
| didn't click until late teens or early 20s that "its" is
| supposed to be a separate word along the lines of "his" and
| "hers".
| 8note wrote:
| i dont think its/it's will still be distinct in the dictionary
| in 15 years. Native english speakers dont really care about the
| difference, and autocorrect on touch keyboards have
| disconnected a lot of the input and output of people's typing.
| steipete wrote:
| tbh in the time where everyone uses AI to write articles, some
| typos and mistakes like that are helpful to show that it's
| human made.
| codyb wrote:
| I'm very confused.
|
| In the picture right at the top of the article, the top of the
| bell curve is using 8 agents in parallel, and yada yada yada.
|
| And then they go on to talk about how they're using 9 agents in
| parallel at a cost of 1000 dollars a month for a 300k line
| (personal?) project?
|
| I dunno, this just feels like as much effort as actually learning
| how to write the code yourself and then just doing it, except, at
| the end... all you have is skills for tuning models that
| constantly change under you.
|
| And it costs you 1000 dollars a month for this experience?
| woeirua wrote:
| 300k lines of AIslop that probably would've been 20k lines of
| code from a human. And the human has no ability to maintain it,
| or to reason about it.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| I'm picturing COBOL developers in the 80s saying the same
| thing about modern developers today (without even bringing in
| AI).
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| COBOL developers may have claimed that higher-level
| language developers didn't understand what was happening
| under the hood. However, they never suggested those
| developers couldn't understand the high-level code itself
| (what's going on here)--only what lay beneath it.
| bitwize wrote:
| But COBOL developers resisted modern tooling. A coworker
| of mine tells the story of when he was working alongside
| an old mainframe hand more than 25 years ago, and was
| trying to explain to him how modern IDEs work. The
| mainframe guy gave him a disdainful look and said "That
| ain't how computing is done, kid."
|
| Now what the guys above the programmers' paygrade knew
| was that the aim of software development wasn't really
| code, it was value delivered to customer. If 300k lines
| if AI slop deliver that value quickly, they can be worth
| much more than the 20k lines of beautiful human-written
| code.
| hitarpetar wrote:
| I would wager that using a fully fledged IDE has limited
| to no correlation with developer productivity across the
| entire industry
| asdff wrote:
| COBOL guy has a point. Novel writers didn't get any
| better when they switched from the typewriter to ms word.
| eaglelamp wrote:
| Higher level abstractions are built on rational
| foundations, that is the distinction. I may not understand
| byte code generated by a compiler, but I could research the
| compiler and understand how it is generated. No matter how
| much I study a language model I will never understand how
| it chose to generate any particular output.
| fragmede wrote:
| Then you'd love "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL", by Ed
| Post. It's about Fortran vs PASCAL, though it does mention
| COBOL in passing. It's copyright 1983!
|
| https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html
| bdangubic wrote:
| every one of the snarky comments like this on myriad of HN
| threads like this:
|
| 1. assumes most humans write good code (or even better than
| LLMs)
|
| 2. will stick around to maintain it
|
| after 30 years in the industry and last 10 as consultant I
| can tell you fairly definitively that #1 _cannot_ be further
| from the truth and #2 is frequent cause of consultants
| getting gigs, no one understand what "Joe" did with this :)
| mattmanser wrote:
| I think it's hard as he's done a huge article about coding
| with agents, with no code examples.
|
| You can go look at his GitHub but it's a bewildering array
| of projects. I've had a bit of a poke around at a few of
| the seemingly more recent ones. Bit odd though as in one
| he's gone heavy on TS classes and another heavy on
| functions. Might be he was just contributing to one as it
| was under a different account.
|
| And a lot of them seem to be tools that wrap a lot of cli
| tools. There is a ton of scaffolding code, to handle a ton
| of cli options. A LOT of logger stmts, one file I randomly
| opened was a logger stmt every other line.
|
| So it's hard to judge, I found it hard to wade through the
| code as it's basically just a bunch of option handling for
| tool calls. It didn't really _do_ much. But necessary,
| probably?
|
| Just very different code than I need to write.
|
| And there are some weird tells that make it hard to
| believe.
|
| For example, he talks about refactoring for useEffect in
| React but I KNOW GPT5 is really rubbish at it.
|
| Some code it's given me recently was littered with
| useEffect and useMemo when it wasn't needed. Then when
| challenged it got rid of some, then changed other stuff to
| useEffect when again, it wasnt needed.
|
| And then got all confused and basically blew it's top.
|
| Yet this person says he can just chuck a basic prompt at
| his codex cli, running GPT5 and it magically refractors the
| bad useEffects?
|
| How are we getting such different results?
| bdangubic wrote:
| Personally, my experience with codex is same as yours, no
| way I would ever use codex for TS projects and especially
| not React. I don't know this mate personally but if we
| were talking about this over beer I would probably tell
| you (after 3rd one when I am more open to being direct)
| that I think I trust this blog as much as I trust
| President (this one or previous ones) to tell the truth
| :)
|
| My comment was more geared towards an insane amount of
| comments on myriad of "AI" / "agent coding" posts where
| soooooo many people will write "oh, such AI slop"
| assuming that average SWE would write it better. I don't
| know many things but working with these tools _heavily_
| over the last year or so (and really heavily last 6
| months) I 'll take their output over general average SWE
| every day of the week and twice on Sunday (provided that
| I am driving the code generation myself, not general AI
| generated code...)
| steipete wrote:
| (OP) the current projec is closed source. If you look at
| my cli tools, that's pure slop, all I care is that it
| works, so reviewing that code for sure will show some
| weird stuff. Does it matter? It's a tool to fetch logs
| form a server. I run it locally. As long as is does that
| reliably, idk about the code.
| steipete wrote:
| OP: If you give the llm examples like
| https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect, it
| does a farily good job at refactoring useEffecs.
|
| And yes refactoring sometimes re-introduces these, so
| it's not a perfect solution.
| ljm wrote:
| This is like having a normal distribution where the average is
| a 1x engineer, a standard deviation below is a 0x engineer, and
| a standard deviation above is a 10x engineer. Which would make
| more sense because someone running 9 agents with multiple git
| checkouts and what-not is just managing a team of synthetic
| vibe coders.
| esafak wrote:
| I wonder how many lines of code he generates and reviews a day.
| With five subscriptions I do not think it is possible to read it
| all. You can generate more code than you can read with just one
| subscription.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Is this paid content from OpenAI?
| simonw wrote:
| No.
|
| In the USA it's actually not legal for companies to pay for
| promotional content like this without disclosure. Here's the
| FTC's FAQ about that: https://www.ftc.gov/business-
| guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...
|
| (It's pretty weird to me how much this comes up - there's this
| cynical idea that nobody would possibly write at length about
| how they're using these tools for their own work unless they
| were a paid shill.)
| ljm wrote:
| Meta feedback: there are so many external links in this post (the
| majority being to Twitter) that it really feels like the audience
| is just...people who follow this guy on Twitter. There must be
| about 25 separate links to one-liner tweets.
|
| Surely one of those 9 parallel AI agents could add something like
| footnotes with context?
| FitchApps wrote:
| Feels like with 3 agents coding non-stop you're no longer a coder
| but rather a manager of sorts...is it even possible to code / fix
| things by yourself in an environment such as this?
| nf17 wrote:
| Looks like many are questioning the credibility of the author as
| a dev/engineer. Peter is the founder of PDFKit and well respected
| name in iOS circles for his contribution to .framework and ideas
| about building modular iOS apps. He may be overselling here, but
| pretty sure he can manage AI generated code
| bionhoward wrote:
| Is using these terminal agents with customer noncompete and no
| privacy questionable when cursor has the same models and privacy
| mode?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I get the idea that different AI have different characters, and
| different people can either 'get along with them' or not.
|
| To wit, I have absolutely no problems with claude code, but
| anytime I try to do anything useful with chatgpt it turns into
| (effectively) a shouting match; There's just no way that
| particular AI and I can see eye-to-eye. (there's underlying
| procedural reasons I think)
|
| The author of this piece has the exact opposite experience.
| Apparently they hate Claude with a passion, but love ChatGPT.
| Weird!
| lysecret wrote:
| This is a fascinating aspect. I also find much more usage out
| of Claude code and its willingness to go along with my ideas
| and be "steerable" seems to be part of it with codex many times
| it kept on overwriting changes I told it to make. It's a clear
| kind of disagreeableness trait in action. Makes me think!
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