[HN Gopher] Professional software developers don't vibe, they co...
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Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
Author : dpflan
Score : 76 points
Date : 2025-12-30 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > Through field observations (N=13) and qualitative surveys
| (N=99)...
|
| Not a statistically significant sample size.
| superjose wrote:
| Same thoughts exactly.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Significance depends on effect size.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 97 samples is enough to get a 95% confidence level if you
| accept a 10% margin of error. 99 is not so bad, at least.
|
| https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/
| flurie wrote:
| This is a qualitative methods paper, so statistical
| significance is not relevant. The rough qualitative equivalent
| would instead be "data saturation" (responses generally look
| like ones you've received already) and "thematic saturation"
| (you've likely found all the themes you will find through this
| method of data collection). There's an intuitive quality to
| determining the number of responses needed based on the topic
| and research questions, but this looks to me like they have
| achieved sufficient thematic saturation based on the results.
| runtimepanic wrote:
| The title is doing a lot of work here. What resonated with me is
| the shift from "writing code" to "steering systems" rather than
| the hype framing. Senior devs already spend more time
| constraining, reviewing, and shaping outcomes than typing syntax.
| AI just makes that explicit. The real skill gap isn't prompt
| cleverness, it's knowing when the agent is confidently wrong and
| how to fence it in with tests, architecture, and invariants. That
| part doesn't scale magically.
| llmslave2 wrote:
| Does using an LLM to craft Hackernews comments count as
| "steering systems"?
| coip wrote:
| You're totally right! It's not steering systems -- it's
| cooking, apparently
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's difficult to steer complex systems correctly, because no
| one has a complete picture of the end goal at the outset.
| That's why waterfall fails. Writing code agentically means you
| have to go out of your way to think deeply about what you're
| building, because it won't be forced on you by the act of
| writing code. If your requirements are complex, they might
| actually be a hindrance because you're going have to learn
| those lessons from failed iterations instead of avoiding them
| preemptively.
| asmor wrote:
| Is anyone else getting more mentally exhausted by this? I get
| more done, but I also miss the relaxing code typing in the
| middle of the process.
| simonw wrote:
| Yes, absolutely, I can be mentally wiped out by lunch.
| jghn wrote:
| That's kind of the point here. Once a dev reached a certain
| level, they often weren't doing much "relaxing code typing"
| anyways before the AI movement. I don't find it to be much
| different than being a tech lead, architect, or similar role.
| remich wrote:
| As a former tech lead and now staff engineer, I definitely
| agree with this. I read a blog post a couple of months ago
| that theorized that the people that would adopt these
| technologies the best were people in the exact roles that
| you describe. I think because we were already used to
| having to rely on other people to execute on our plans and
| ideas because they were simply too big to accomplish by
| ourselves. Now that we have agents to do these things, it's
| not really all that different - although it is a different
| management style working around their limitations.
| tikimcfee wrote:
| Ya know, I have to admit feeling something like this.
| Normally, the amount of stuff I put together in a work day
| offers a sense of completion or even a bit of a dopamine bump
| because of a "job well done". With this recent work I've been
| doing, it's instead felt like I've been spending a multiplier
| more energy communicating intent instead of doing the work
| myself; that communication seems to be making me more tired
| than the work itself. Similar?
| whynotminot wrote:
| It feels like we all signed up to be ICs, but now we're
| middle managers and our reports are bots.
| perfmode wrote:
| You're possibly not entering into the flow state anymore.
|
| Flow is effortless. and it is rejuvenating.
|
| I believe:
|
| While communication can be satisfying, it's not as
| rejuvenating as resting in our own Being and simply
| allowing the action to unfold without mental contraction.
|
| Flow states.
|
| When the right level of challenge and capability align and
| you become intimate with the problem. The boundaries of me
| and the problem dissolve and creativity springs forth.
| Emerging satisfied. Nourished.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I like to alternate focusing on AI wrangling and writing code
| the old fashioned way.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Nah, I don't miss at all typing all the tests, CLIs, and APIs
| I've created hundreds of times before. I dunno if I it's
| because I do ML stuff, but it's almost all "think a lot about
| something, do some math, and and then type thousands of lines
| of the same stuff around the interesting work."
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| For me it's the opposite, I'm wasting less energy over
| debugging silly bugs and fighting/figuring out some annoying
| config.
|
| But it does feel less fulfilling I suppose.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think there are two groups of people emerging. deep / fast
| / craft-and-decomposition-loving vs black box / outcome-only.
|
| I've seen people unable to work at average speed on small
| features suddenly reach above average output through a llm
| cli and I could sense the pride in them. Which is at odds
| with my experience of work.. I love to dig down, know a lot,
| model and find abstractions on my own. There a llm will 1)
| not understand how my brain work 2) produce something
| workable but that requires me to stretch mentally.. and most
| of the time I leave numb. In the last month I've seen many
| people expressing similar views.
| sanufar wrote:
| I think for me, the difference really comes down to how
| much ownership I want to take in regards to the project. If
| it's something like a custom kernel that I'm building, the
| real fun is in reading through docs, learning about
| systems, and trying to craft the perfect abstractions; but
| if it's wiring up a simple pipeline that sends me a text
| whenever my bus arrives, I'm happy to let an LLM crank that
| out for me.
|
| I've realized that a lot of my coding is on this personal
| satisfaction vs utility matrix and llms let me focus a lot
| more energy onto high satisfaction projects
| remich wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but I would say that this does
| not match my own experience. For me, prior to the agentic
| coding era, the problem was always that I had way more
| ideas for features, tools, or projects than I had the
| capacity to build when I had to confront the work of
| building everything by hand, also dealing with the
| inevitable difficulties in procrastination and getting
| started.
|
| I am a very above-average engineer when it comes to speed
| at completing work well, whether that's typing speed or
| comprehension speed, and still these tools have felt like
| giving me a jetpack for my mind. I can get things done in
| weeks that would have taken me months before, and that
| opens up space to consider new areas that I wouldn't have
| even bothered exploring before because I would not have had
| the time to execute on them well.
| ronsor wrote:
| The sibling comments (from remich and sanufar) match my
| experience.
|
| 1. I do love getting into the details of code, but I don't
| mind having an LLM handle boilerplate.
|
| 2. There isn't a binary between having an LLM generate all
| the code and writing it all myself.
|
| 3. I still do most of the design work because LLMs often
| make questionable design decisions.
|
| 4. Sometimes I simply want a program to solve a purpose
| (outcome-focused) over a project to work on (craft-
| focused). Sometimes I need a small program in order to
| focus on the larger project, and being able to delegate
| that work has made it more enjoyable.
| zahlman wrote:
| > I do love getting into the details of code, but I don't
| mind having an LLM handle boilerplate.
|
| My usual thought is that boilerplate tells me, by
| existing, where the system is most flawed.
|
| I do like the idea of having a tool that quickly patches
| the problem while also forcing me to think about its
| presence.
|
| > There isn't a binary between having an LLM generate all
| the code and writing it all myself. I still do most of
| the design work because LLMs often make questionable
| design decisions.
|
| One workflow that makes sense to me is to have the LLM
| commit on a branch; fix simple issues instead of trying
| to make it work (with all the worry of context
| poisoning); refactor on the same branch; merge; and then
| repeat for the next feature -- starting more or less from
| scratch except for the agent config (CLAUDE.md etc.).
| Does that sound about right? Maybe you do something less
| formal?
|
| > Sometimes I simply want a program to solve a purpose
| (outcome-focused) over a project to work on (craft-
| focused). Sometimes I need a small program in order to
| focus on the larger project, and being able to delegate
| that work has made it more enjoyable.
|
| Yeah, that sounds about right.
| zahlman wrote:
| > deep / fast / craft-and-decomposition-loving vs black box
| / outcome-only
|
| As a (self-reported) craft-and-decomposition lover, I
| wouldn't call the process "fast".
|
| Certainly it's much faster than if I were trying to take
| the same approach without the same skills; and certainly I
| could slow it down with over-engineering. (And "deep"
| absolutely fits.) But the people I've known that I'd
| characterize as strongly "outcome-only", were certainly
| capable of sustaining some pretty high delta-LoC per day.
| SJMG wrote:
| I think it's the serial waiting game and inevitable context
| switching while you wait.
|
| Long iteration cycles are taxing
| codeformoney wrote:
| The stereotype that writing code is for junior developers needs
| to die. Some devs are hired with lofty titles specifically for
| their programming aptitude and esoteric systems knowlege, not
| to play implementation telephone with inexperienced devs.
| remich wrote:
| I don't think that anyone actually believes that writing code
| is only for junior developers. That seems to be a significant
| exaggeration at the very least. However, it is definitely
| true that most organizations of this size are hiring people
| into technical lead, staff engineer, or principal engineer
| roles are hiring those people not only for their individual
| expertise, or ability to apply that expertise themselves, but
| also for their ability to use that expertise as a force
| multiplier to make other less experienced people better at
| the craft.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > Most Recent Task for Survey
|
| > Number of Survey Respondents
|
| > Building apps 53
|
| > Testing 1
|
| I think this sums up everybody complaints about AI generated
| code. Don't ask me to be the one to review work you didn't even
| check.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Yea. Nobody wants to be a full-time code reviewer.
| jaggederest wrote:
| Hi it's me, the guy who wants to be a full-time code
| reviewer.
| nemo wrote:
| Be careful what you wish for.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| I like to think of it as "maintaining fertile soil"
| banbangtuth wrote:
| You know what. After seeing all these articles about AI/LLM for
| these past 4 years, about how they are going to replace me as
| software developers and about how I am not productive enough
| without using 5 agents and being a project manager.
|
| I. Don't. Care.
|
| I don't even care about those debates outside. Debates about do
| LLM work and replace programmers? Say they do, ok so what?
|
| I simply have too much fun programming. I am just a mere
| fullstack business line programmer, generic random replaceable
| dude, you can find me dime a dozen.
|
| I do use LLM as Stack Overflow/docs replacement, but I always
| code by hand all my code.
|
| If you want to replace me, replace me. I'll go to companies that
| need me. If there are no companies that need my skill, fine, then
| I'll just do this as a hobby, and probably flip burgers outside
| to make a living.
|
| I don't care about your LLM, I don't care about your agent, I
| probably don't even care about the job prospects for that matter
| if I have to be forced to use tools that I don't like and to use
| workflows I don't like. You can go ahead find others who are
| willing to do it for you.
|
| As for me, I simply have too much fun programming. Now if you
| excuse me, I need to go have fun.
| agentifysh wrote:
| having fun isn't tied to employment unless you are self-
| employed even then what's fun should not be the driving force
| banbangtuth wrote:
| Why? It is a matter of values. Fun can be a driving force
| just like money and stability is. It is simply a matter of
| your values (and your sacrifices).
|
| Like I said, I am just a generic replaceable dime a dozen
| programmer dude.
| agentifysh wrote:
| you dont get paid to have fun but to produce as a laborer
|
| a job isn't supposed to be fun its nice when it is but it
| shouldn't be what drives decisions
| banbangtuth wrote:
| You mean it shouldn't be the driving force of your
| employer to make decision. Yes I agree 10000%
|
| I meant it can be your (not necessarily your employer)
| driving decision in life.
|
| Of course, you need to suffer. That's about having
| tradeoffs.
| agentifysh wrote:
| almost all employers are going to expect you to use AI
| and produce more with it
|
| you can definitely choose not to participate and give the
| opportunity someone who are happy to use AI and still
| have fun with it.
| tikhonj wrote:
| most organizations have awful leadership, sure
|
| but that doesn't mean you can't (or shouldn't) work
| around it
| llmslave2 wrote:
| That sounds miserable to me :(
| agentifysh wrote:
| you work on somebody's dime, its no longer your choice
| llmslave2 wrote:
| It's my life, it's my choice.
| zem wrote:
| it's your choice whose dime you work on. they can compete
| for your work by making it fun for you.
| agentifysh wrote:
| sure unemployment is also a choice
| zem wrote:
| fun work > tedious work > unemployment
|
| not sure why so many people feel like factoring fun into
| what job you want to take is so unthinkable, or that it's
| just a false dichotomy between the ideal job and
| unemployment
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| "get a job doing something you enjoy and you'll never work a
| day in your life"
|
| or something like that
| llmslave2 wrote:
| I simply will not spend my life begging and coaxing a machine
| to output working code. If that is what becomes of this
| profession, I will just do something else :)
| aspenmartin wrote:
| It would definitely be the profession if we stopped
| developing things today. Think about the idea of coding
| agents 2 years ago, I personally found them very unrealistic
| and am now coding exclusively with them despite them being
| either a neutral or net negative to my development time
| simply because I see the writing on the wall that in 6 mos to
| a year they will probably be a huge net positive and in 2-3
| years the dismissive attitude towards adoption will start to
| look kind of silly (no offense). To me we are _just_ at the
| inflection point where using and not using coding agents are
| both totally sensible decisions.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| If I wanted to do that, I'd just move into engineering
| management and work with something less temperamental and
| predictable - humans.
|
| I'd at least be more likely to get a boost in impact and
| ability to affect decision making, maybe.
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| Until you realize you're just begging and coaxing a human
| to better beg and coax a machine to output working code -
| when you could just beg and coax the machine yourself.
| llmslave2 wrote:
| At least I'd be the one interfacing with a human instead
| of a machine :P
| yacthing wrote:
| Easy to say if you either:
|
| (1) already have enough money to survive without working, or
|
| (2) don't realize how hard of a life it would be to "flip
| burgers" to make a living in 2026.
|
| We live very good lives as software developers. Don't be a fool
| and think you could just "flip burgers" and be fine.
| banbangtuth wrote:
| Ah, I actually did flip burgers. So I know.
|
| I also did dry cleaning, cleaning service, deli, delivery
| guy, etc.
|
| Yup I now have enough money to survive without working.
|
| But I also am very low maintenance, thanks to my early life
| being raised in harsh conditions.
|
| I am not scared to go back flipping burgers again.
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| Hear hear. I didn't spend half my life getting an education,
| competing in the corporate crab bucket, retraining and
| upskilling just to turn into a robot babysitter.
| websiteapi wrote:
| we've never seen a profession drive themselves so aggressively to
| irrelevance. software engineering will always exist, but it's
| amazing the pace to which pressure against the profession is
| rising. 2026 will be a very happy new year indeed for those
| paying the salaries. :)
| zwnow wrote:
| Also it really baffles me how many are actually in on the hype
| train. Its a lot more than the crypto bros back in the day.
| Good thing AI still cant reason and innovate stuff. Also
| leaking credentials is a felony in my country so I also wont
| ever attach it to my codebases.
| fragmede wrote:
| your credentials shouldn't be in your codebase to begin with!
| zwnow wrote:
| .env files are a thing in tons of codebases
| iwontberude wrote:
| but thats at runtime, secrets are going to be deployed in
| a secure manner after the code is released
| zwnow wrote:
| .env files are used to develop as well, for some things
| like PayPal u dont have to change the credentials, you
| just enable sandbox mode. If I had some LLM attached to
| my codebase, it would be able to read those credentials
| from the .env file.
|
| This has nothing to do with deployment. I never talked
| about deployment.
| Carrok wrote:
| If you have your PayPal creds in your repository, you are
| doing it wrong.
| mkozlows wrote:
| If your secrets are in your repo, you've probably already
| leaked them.
| aspenmartin wrote:
| I think the issue is folks talk past each other. People who
| find coding agents useful or enjoyable are labeled "on the
| hype train" and folks for which coding agents don't work for
| them or their workflow are considered luddites. There are an
| incredible number of contradicting claims and predictions out
| there as well, and I believe what we see is folks projecting
| their reaction to some amalgamation of them onto others. I
| see a lot of "they" language, and a lot of viral articles
| about business leadership "shoving AI down our throats" and
| it becomes a divisive issue like American political scene
| with really no one having a real conversation
| zwnow wrote:
| Its all a hype train though. People still believe in the AI
| gonna bring utopia bullshit while the current infra is
| being built on debt. The only reason it still exists is
| that all these AI companies believe in some kind of revenue
| outside of subscriptions. So its all about:
|
| Owning the infrastructure and enshittify (ads) once enough
| products are based on AI.
|
| Its the same chokehold Amazon has on its Vendors.
| llmslave2 wrote:
| I think the reason for the varying claims and predictions
| is because developers have wildly different standards for
| what constitutes working code. For the developers with a
| lower threshold, AI is like crack to them because gen ai's
| output is similar to what they would produce, and it really
| is a 10x speedup. For others, especially those who have to
| fix and maintain that code, it's more like a 10x slowdown.
|
| Hence why you have in the same thread, some developer who
| claims that Claude writes 99% of their code and another
| developer who finds it totally useless. And of course
| others who are somewhere in the middle.
| throw1235435 wrote:
| There's also the effect of different models. Until the
| most recent models, especially for concise algorithms, I
| felt it was still easier to sometimes do it myself (i.e.
| a good algo can be concise/more concise than a lossy
| prompt) and leave the "expansion/repetitive" boilerplate
| code to the LLM. At least for me the latest models do
| feel like a "step change" in that the problems can be
| bigger and/or require less supervision on each problem
| depending on the tradeoff you want.
| remich wrote:
| Have you considered that it's a bit dismissive to assume
| that developers who find use out of AI tools necessarily
| approve of worse code than you do, or have lower
| standards?
|
| It's fine to be a skeptic. Or to have tried out these
| tools and found that they do not work well for your
| particular use case at this moment in time. But you
| shouldn't assume that people who do get value out of them
| are not as good at the job as you are, or are dumber than
| you are, or slower than you are. That's just not a good
| practice and is also rude.
| simonw wrote:
| We've been giving our work away to each other for free as open
| source to help improve each other's productivity for 30+ years
| now and that's only made our profession more valuable.
| websiteapi wrote:
| I see little proof open source has resulted in higher wages
| and not the fact that everything is being digitized and the
| subsequent demand for such people to assist in such.
| simonw wrote:
| I'm not sure how I can prove it, but ~25 years ago building
| software without open source _sucked_. You had to build
| everything from scratch! It took months to get even the
| most basic things up and running.
|
| I think open source is the single most important
| productivity boost to our industry that's ever existed.
| Automated testing is a close second.
|
| Google, Facebook, many others would not have existed
| without open source to build on.
|
| And those giants and others like them that were enabled by
| open source employed a TON of people, at competitive rates
| that greatly increased our salaries.
| websiteapi wrote:
| even if that's true it's clear enough AI will reduce the
| demand for swe
| simonw wrote:
| I don't think that's certain. I'm hoping for a Jevons
| paradox situation where AI drives down the cost of
| producing software to the point that companies that
| previously weren't in the market for custom software
| start hiring software engineers. I think we could see
| demand go up.
| throw1235435 wrote:
| Indeed it did; I remember those times. All else being
| equal I still think SWE salaries on average would of been
| higher if we kept it like that given basic economics -
| there would of been a lot less people capable of doing it
| but the high ROI automation opportunities would of still
| been there. The fact that "it sucked" usually creates
| more scarcity on the supply side; which all being equal
| means higher wages and in our capitalist society -
| status. Other professions that are older as to the parent
| comment already know this and don't see SWE as very
| "street smart" disrupting themselves. I've seen articles
| recently like "at least we aren't in coding" from law,
| accounting, etc an an anecdote to this.
|
| With AI at least locally I'm seeing the opposite now -
| less hiring, less wage pressure and in social circles a
| lot less status when I mention I'm a SWE (almost sympathy
| for my lot vs respect only 5 years ago). While I don't
| care for the status aspect, although I do care for my
| ability to earn money, some do.
|
| At least locally inflation adjusted in my city SWE wages
| bought more and were higher in general compared to others
| in the 90's-2000's than on wards (ex big tech). Partly
| because this difficulty and low level knowledge meant
| only very skilled people could participate.
| ipdashc wrote:
| > ex big tech
|
| I mean, this seems like a pretty big thing to leave out,
| no? That's where all the crazy high salaries were!
|
| Also, there are still legacy places that more or less
| build software like it's 1999. I get the impression that
| embedded, automotive, and such still rely a lot on
| proprietary tools, finicky manual processes, low level
| languages (obviously), etc. But those are notorious for
| being annoying and not very well paid.
| throw1235435 wrote:
| Well globally it is a drop in the ocean compared to most
| tech jobs - I'm talking about what I perceive to be the
| median affected somewhat by my locality. My point is more
| that I remember back in that period good salaries could
| be had outside big tech too even in the boring standard
| companies that you state. I remember banks, insurance,
| etc paying very well for example compared to today for an
| SWE/tech worker. Now at best they are on par with other
| professional white collar workers; and the competition
| seems fiercer (e.g. 5 interviews for a similar salary to
| other professional workers).
|
| Making software easier and more abstract has allowed less
| technical people into the profession, allowed easier
| outsourcing, meant more competition/interview prep to
| filter out people (even if the skills are not used in the
| job at all), etc.
| christophilus wrote:
| 25 years ago, I was slinging apps together super fast
| using VB6. It was awesome. It was a level of productivity
| few modern stacks can approach.
| fshacf wrote:
| Then shit suckers like you scraped it all, ignored the
| licensing, and sold it back to the very people you took from
| for a premium.
| andy99 wrote:
| Is the title an ironic play on AI's trademark writing style, is
| it AI generated, or is the style just rubbing off on people?
| mattnewton wrote:
| I think it's a popular style before gen ai and the training
| process of LLMs picked up on that.
| andy99 wrote:
| That's not how LLMs work, it's part of the reinforcement
| learning or SFT dataset, data labelers would have written or
| generated tons of examples using this and other patterns (all
| the emoji READMEs for example) that the models emulate. The
| early ones had very formulaic essay style outputs that always
| ended with "in conclusion", lots of the same kind of bullet
| lists, and a love of adjectives and delving, all of which
| were intentionally trained in. It's more subtle now but it's
| still there.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Maybe I was being imprecise, but I'm not sure what you mean
| by "not how LLMs work" - discovering patterns of how humans
| write is exactly the signal they are trained against.
| Either explicitly curated like SFT or coaxed out during
| RLHF, no?
|
| It could even have been picked up in pretraining and then
| rewarded during rlhf when the output domain was being
| refined; I haven't used enough LLMs before post training to
| know what step it usually becomes noticeable.
| zwnow wrote:
| Idk, I still mostly avoid using it and if I do, I just copy and
| paste shit into the Claude web version. I wont ever manage agents
| as that sounds just as complicated as coding shit myself.
| lexandstuff wrote:
| It's not complicated at all. You don't "manage agents". You
| just type your prompt into an terminal application that can
| update files, read your docs and run your tests.
|
| As with every new tech there's a hell of a lot of noise
| (plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP - to quote Kaparthy) but most
| of it can just be disregarded. No one is "behind" - it's all
| very easy to use.
| simonw wrote:
| This is pretty recent - the survey they ran (99 respondents) was
| August 18 to September 23 2025 and the field observations
| (watching developers for 45 minute then a 30 minute interview, 13
| participants) were August 1 to October 3.
|
| The models were mostly GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4. The study was
| too early to catch the 5.x Codex or Claude 4.5 models (bar one
| mention of Sonnet 4.5.)
|
| This is notable because a lot of academic papers take 6-12 months
| to come out, by which time the LLM space has often moved on by an
| entire model generation.
| dheera wrote:
| > academic papers take 6-12 months to come out
|
| It takes about 6 months to figure out how to get LaTeX to
| position figures where you want them, and then another 6 months
| to fight with reviewers
| joenot443 wrote:
| Thanks Simon - always quick on the draw.
|
| Off your intuition, do you think the same study with Codex 5.2
| and Opus 4.5 would see even better results?
| simonw wrote:
| Depends on the participants. If they're cutting-edge LLM
| users then yes, I think so. If they continue to use LLMs like
| they would have back in the first half of 2025 I'm not sure
| if a difference would be noticeable.
| mkozlows wrote:
| I'm not remotely cutting edge (just switched from Cursor to
| Codex CLI, have no fancy tooling infrastructure, am not
| even vaguely considering git worktrees as a means of
| working), but Opus 4.5 and 5.2 Codex are both so clearly
| more competent than previous models that I've started just
| telling them to do high-level things rather than trying to
| break things down and give them subtasks.
|
| If people are really set in their ways, maybe they won't
| try anything beyond what old models can do, and won't
| notice a difference, but who's had time to get set in their
| ways with this stuff?
| christophilus wrote:
| I mostly agree, but today, Opus 4.5 via Claude code did
| something pretty dumb stuff in my codebase-- N queries
| where one would do, deep array comparison where a
| reference equality check would suffice, very complex web
| of nested conditionals which a competent developer would
| have never written, some edge cases where the backend
| endpoints didn't properly verify user permissions before
| overwriting data, etc.
|
| It's still hit or miss. The product "worked" when I
| tested it as a black box, but the code had a lot of rot
| in it already.
|
| Maybe that stuff no longer matters. Maybe it does. Time
| will tell.
| remich wrote:
| I have had a lot of success lately when working with Opus
| 4.5 using both the Beads task tracking system and the
| array of skills under the umbrella of Bad Dave's Robot
| Army. I don't have a link handy, but you should be able
| to find it on GitHub. I use the specialized skills for
| different review tasks (like Architecture Review,
| Performance Review, Security Review, etc.) on every
| completed task in addition to my own manual review, and I
| find that that helps to keep things from getting out of
| hand.
| drbojingle wrote:
| What's the difference between using llms now vs the first
| half of 2025 among the best users?
| zkmon wrote:
| I haven't seen the definition of an agent, in the paper. Do they
| differentiate agents from generic online chat interfaces?
| esafak wrote:
| An agent takes actions. Chat bots only return text.
| senshan wrote:
| Excellent survey, but one has to be careful when participating in
| such surveys:
|
| _" I'm on disability, but agents let me code again and be more
| productive than ever (in a 25+ year career). - S22"_
|
| Once Social Security Administration learns this, there goes the
| disability benefit...
| LoganDark wrote:
| I think you eventually lose disability benefits anyway once you
| start making money.
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