[HN Gopher] 747s and Coding Agents
___________________________________________________________________
747s and Coding Agents
Author : cckolon
Score : 111 points
Date : 2026-02-27 17:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (carlkolon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (carlkolon.com)
| flyinglizard wrote:
| This is why I still haven't embraced agents in my work but stick
| with halfway manual workflow using aider. It's the only way I can
| keep ownership of the codebase. Maybe this will change because
| code ownership will no longer have any value, but I don't feel
| like we're there yet.
| skepticATX wrote:
| Reviewing code is absolutely different from writing it, and in my
| opinion much harder if the goal is more than surface level
| understanding.
|
| This is what I am still grappling with. Agents make more
| productive, but also probably worse at my job.
| omoikane wrote:
| > reviewing code is very different from producing it, and surely
| teaches you less
|
| Maybe he meant "reviewing code from coding agents"? Reviewing
| code from other humans is often a great way to learn.
| tass wrote:
| I interpreted this as not as good a way to learn.
|
| I learn the most from struggling through a problem, and reading
| someone's code doesn't teach me all the wrong ways they
| attempted before it looked like the way it now does.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| This is why tutorials in programming don't really teach much
| because you get the finished version. Not all the wrong steps
| that were taken, why they failed, what else was tried.
|
| These steps are what help you solve other issues in the
| future.
| omoikane wrote:
| I was thinking in situations where a coworker might send me
| something to review, and I might have thought "hmm, I
| wouldn't have done it like that, but this is a great way to
| do it too". Also, a good source of teachable code is to
| participate in a programming contest, and then review the
| repositories of the teams who scored better than me after the
| contest.
|
| I agree that if I don't already know how to implement
| something, seeing a solution before trying it myself is not
| great, that's like skipping the homework exercises and
| copying straight from the answer books.
| snackerblues wrote:
| Exactly. And vice versa, one of the biggest benefits of code
| review is calling out pitfalls you, the reviewer have ran
| into that the reviewee isn't aware of. LLM addicts won't have
| any experience with what works/doesn't work, so their
| reviewing will be pretty useless
| thesz wrote:
| > I do read the code, but reviewing code is very different from
| producing it, and surely teaches you less. If you don't believe
| this, I doubt you work in software.
|
| I work in software and for single line I write I read hundredths
| of them.
|
| If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I
| read my program several times, over and over again. If writing
| programs taught me something, it is how to read programs most
| effectively. And also how to write programs to be most
| effectively read.
| dongguanxianhao wrote:
| >hundredths of them
|
| Man, it would rule so much if programmers were literate and
| knew how to actually communicate what they intend to say.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Man it would rule so much if programmers could manage not to
| be assholes by default so much of the time.
|
| It's ironic that the more ignorant one is the one calling
| another ignorant.
|
| Alright I've had my fun with the name-calling. I will now
| explain the stunningly obvious. Not a thing anyone should
| have to for someone so sharp as yourself but there we are...
|
| For someone to produce that text after growing up in an
| English speaking environment, they would indeed be comically
| inept communicators. Which is why the more reasonable
| assumption is that English is not in fact their native
| language.
|
| Not merely the more generous assumption. Being generous by
| default would be a better character trait than not, but still
| arguably a luxury. But also simply the more reasonable
| assumption by plain numbers and reasoning. So, not only were
| you a douche, you had to go out of your way to select a less
| likely possibility to make the douche you wanted to be fit
| the situation.
|
| Literate programmers indeed.
| epgui wrote:
| Not everyone has English as a first language.
| MDCore wrote:
| It's obvious from the context here what the intended meaning
| was. Everyone makes typos sometimes.
| GTP wrote:
| > If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education)
| programs, I read my program several times
|
| I think here lies the difference OP is talking about. You are
| reading your own code, which means you had to first put in the
| effort to write it. If you use LLMs, you are reading code you
| didn't write.
| thesz wrote:
| If I need to change someone's code, I also read it. several
| times.
| hosh wrote:
| I read other people's code all the time. I work as a platform
| engineer with sre functions.
|
| Gemini 3 by itself is insufficient. I often find myself
| tracing through things or testing during runtime to
| understand how things behave. Claude Opus is not much better
| for this.
|
| On the other hand, pairing with Gemini 3 feels like pairing
| with other people. No one is going to get everything right
| all the time. I might ask Gemini to construct gcloud commands
| or look things up for me, but we're trying to figure things
| out together.
| borzi wrote:
| > For example, to add pagination to this website, I would read
| the Jekyll docs, find the right plugin to install, read the
| sample config, and make the change. Possibly this wouldn't work,
| in which case I would Google it, read more, try more stuff,
| retest, etc. In this process it was hard not to learn things.
|
| How is this any different than building Ikea furniture? If I
| build my "Minska" cupboard using the step-by-step manual, did I
| learn something profound?
| skydhash wrote:
| If you've never put a cupboard together, you would have learned
| what the different parts, what size of screws to use (in the
| rough sense),... You may have forget it right after, but when
| someone ask you to help them, you will be a bit more proficient
| than someone with no experience.
|
| But the nice thing about a cupboard and its components is that
| they are real objects, so the remembrance is done with the
| whole body (like the feeling of a screw not correctly
| inserted). Software development is 90% a mental activity.
| MrJohz wrote:
| Firstly, if you're doing those steps, you're building your own
| tutorial, not just following the exact steps in a manual
| provided with the software. The sample config won't be exact or
| perfect for your setup, so you'll need to say least figure out
| how to adjust it to your needs.
|
| That said, I think you're still leaning things building IKEA-
| style software. The first time I learned how to program, I
| learned from a book and I tried things out by copying listings
| from the book by hand into files on my computer and executing
| them. Essentially, it was programming-by-IKEA-manual, but it
| was valuable because I was trying things out with my own hands,
| even if I didn't fully understand every time why I needed the
| code I'd been told to write.
|
| From there I graduated to fiddling with those examples and
| making changes to make it do what I wanted, not what the book
| said. And over time I figured out how to write entirely new
| things, and so on and so forth. But the first step required
| following very simple instructions.
|
| The analogy isn't perfect, because my goal with IKEA furniture
| is usually not to learn how to build furniture, but to get a
| finished product. So I learn a little bit about using tools,
| but not a huge amount. Whereas when typing in that code as a
| kid, my goal was learning, and the finished product was
| basically useless outside of that.
|
| The author's example there feels like a bit of both worlds. The
| task requires more independent thought than an IKEA manual, so
| they need to learn and understand more. But the end goal is
| still practical.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I am not sure how many other people on here are old enough to
| remember, but I first learned to program before I had the
| internet. I had to read books, and then if I was trying to figure
| out how to do something, I would have to figure out which book to
| look it up in, and then figure out where in the book to find it
| and how to apply it to my situation. It made me learn a ton,
| because I would have to read a lot of books to even know where to
| look; I had to do my own 'scraping and indexing'.
|
| I remember as the internet took off and you could just search for
| things, I thought it made programming too easy. You never had to
| actually learn how it worked, you can just search for the
| specific answer and someone else would do the hard work of
| figuring out how to use the tools available for your particular
| type of problem.
|
| Over the years, my feelings shifted, and I loved how the internet
| allowed me to accomplish so much more than I could have trying to
| figure it all out from books.
|
| I wonder if AI will feel similar.
| LatencyKills wrote:
| I've always felt a little odd saying, "Back in my day we _had_
| to understand the cpu, registers, etc. " It's a true statement,
| but doesn't help in any way. Is that stuff still worth knowing,
| IMHO? Yes. Can you create incredibly useful code without that
| knowledge today? Absolutely.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| I don't think it's odd. Sacrificing deep understanding, and
| delegating that responsibility to others is risky. In more
| concrete terms, if your livelihood depends on application
| development, you have concrete dependencies on platforms,
| frameworks, compilers, operating systems, and other
| abstractions that without which you might not be able to
| perform your job.
|
| Fewer abstractions, deeper understanding, fewer dependencies
| on others. These concepts show up over and over and not just
| in software. It's about safety.
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| There are some people who still know these things, and are
| able to use LLMs far more effectively than those who do not.
|
| I've seen the following prediction by a few people and am
| starting to agree with it: software development (and possibly
| most knowledge work) will become like farming. A relatively
| smaller number of people will do with large machines what
| previously took armies of people. There will always be some
| people exploring the cutting edge of thought, and feeding
| their insights into the machine, just how I image there are
| biochemists and soil biology experts who produce knowledge to
| inform decisions made by the people running large farming
| operations.
|
| I imagine this will lead to profound shifts in the world that
| we can hardly predict. If we don't blow ourselves up, perhaps
| space exploration and colonization will become possible.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > Can you create incredibly useful code without that
| knowledge today?
|
| You could do that without that knowledge back in the day too,
| we had languages that were higher level than assembler for
| forever.
|
| It's just that the range of knowledge needed to maximize
| machine usage is far smaller now. Before you had to know how
| to write a ton of optimizations, nowadays you have to know
| how to write your code so the compiler have easy job
| optimizing it.
|
| Before you had to manage the memory accesses, nowadays making
| sure you're not jumping actross memory too much and being
| aware how cache works is enough
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I use AI for very little but I do like using it for stuff I'm
| just not very interested in but have to get done.
|
| For programming, I don't like it. It's like a master carpenter
| building furniture from IKEA. Sure it's faster and he doesn't
| have to think very hard and the end result is acceptable but he
| feels lazy and after a while he feels like he is losing his
| skills.
|
| The best days of computing for me were what you remember. A
| computer was just a blank slate. You turned it on, and had a
| ">" blinking on the screen. If you wanted it to do _anything_
| you had to write a program. And learning how to do that meant
| practice and study and reading... there were no shortcuts. It
| was challenging and frustrating and fun.
| mgfist wrote:
| All fair, but I think a different interpretation could be
| that AI allows you to vastly expand the scope of the
| possible, such to create a situation again where things are
| challenging and frustrating and fun.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| I learned to program on a Commodore 64 using books I could get
| from libraries and some magazines like Compute!'s Gazette. I
| got online very early via BBSes (originally on a 300 baud modem
| for my C64) and was on the internet by the mid to late 1980s.
|
| I never had the feeling that being able to search for things on
| the internet made things too easy. For me it felt like a
| natural extension to books for self-learning, it was just
| faster.
|
| LLMs feel entirely different to me, and that's where I do get
| the sense that they make things "too easy" in that (like the
| author of the OP blog post) I no longer feel like I am building
| any sort of skill when using them other than code review (which
| is not a new skill as it is something I have previously done
| with code produced by other humans for a long time).
|
| As with the OP author I also think that "prompting" as a skill
| is hugely overblown. "Prompting" was maybe a bit more of a
| skill a year ago, but I find that you don't really have to get
| too detailed with current LLMs, you just have to be a bit
| careful not to bias them in negative ways. Whatever value I
| have now as a software developer has more to do with having
| veto power in the instances where the LLM agent goes off the
| rails than it does in constructing prompts.
|
| So for now I'm stuck in a situation where I feel like for work
| I am being paid to do I basically have to use LLMs because not
| doing so is effectively malpractice at this point (because
| there are real efficiency gains), but for selfish reasons if I
| could push a button to erase the existence of LLMs, I'd
| probably do it.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > I never had the feeling that being able to search for
| things on the internet made things too easy. For me it felt
| like a natural extension to books for self-learning, it was
| just faster.
|
| I think this depends on how you are using the internet.
| Looking up an API or official documentation is one thing, but
| asking for direct help on a specific problem via
| Stackoverflow seems different.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| Fair point, Stackoverflow didn't exist for quite a while
| after I started using the internet for information, and
| while I made as much use of it as anyone for googling
| answers to questions such as "What does this specific
| 32-bit HRESULT error code from the Win32 API mean in this
| context", I'm not sure if I ever posted a single question
| on the site.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I dont use it a lot but when I do it's pretty much 2 patterns
|
| * "search on steroids" - get me to the thing I need or ask
| whether the thing I need exists, give me few examples and I can
| get it running.
|
| * getting the trivial and uninteresting parts out of the way,
| like writing some helper function for stuff I'm doing now, I'll
| just call AI, let it do its thing and continue writing the code
| in meantime, look back ,check if it makes sense and use it.
|
| So I'm not really cheating myself out of the learning process,
| just outsource the parts I know well enough that I can check
| for correctness but save time writing
| anonnon wrote:
| Even people _with_ the Internet growing up still learned
| largely through books, probably until StackOverflow really took
| off. One "hack" prior to SO that sometimes goes under-
| acknowledged was Google Groups. Around 2000, they bought and
| made free to the public the entire Deja News USENET archive,
| and suddenly you could search comp.lang.whatever and usually
| find someone who'd asked (and someone who answered) whatever
| question you had. And the signal-to-noise ratio was extremely
| high, given the barriers to entry (technical and financial) to
| being active on USENET's technical groups in the 90s.
|
| Of course, _asking_ a question was another matter, likely to
| result in a rebuke for violating the group 's arcane decorum.
| But given how pervasive "RTFM" culture was back then, most
| "n00bs" were content to do just that (RTFM) until they came up
| against something that genuinely wasn't covered in some FAQ or
| manpage.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I had to read books
|
| Same here. Except that as native french speaker there simply
| weren't that many quality books about programming/computers
| that I could easily find in french.
|
| So at 11 years old I _also_ learned english, by myself, by
| using computers (which were in english back then) and by
| reading computer books.
|
| And we'd exchange tips with other kids in the neighborhood who
| also had computers and were also learning to code (like my
| neighbors who eventually, 20 years later, created a software
| startup in SoCal).
| twodave wrote:
| I find the opposite is true for me. In my wheelhouse I can use an
| agent to do a thing, and I can be very critical of the
| implementation. Outside of my wheelhouse I actually learn quite a
| lot by watching the agent solve a problem. Since I do have a
| strong background I am still able to judge the overall approach
| and identify obvious stupid things the agent tries to do. I would
| say the code quality is probably a bit worse in those situations
| than I would have ended up with, but takes about 1/3 of the time.
| The most difficult part is opening a PR and worrying there might
| be a couple stupid blips left that I missed, didn't affect the
| implementation, but my coworkers are going to look at and ask me
| wtf I was thinking
| Robdel12 wrote:
| Whether we want to accept it or not, we're now QA. That's not
| derogatory, at all.
|
| But I don't think the answer here is to double down on reading
| the code and understanding that deeply. We're rapidly moving past
| this.
|
| I think the answer is to review the code for very obvious bad
| choices. But then it's about proper validation. Check out the
| app, run the flows, use it for real. Does it _actually_ function?
|
| Or that's what is working for me. I cannot review all the LOC and
| I'm starting to feel like I don't want.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| [...] since I work at an AI lab and stand to gain a great deal if
| AI follows through on its economic promise.
|
| And there it is.
| cedws wrote:
| We should be very concerned for the next generation. When you
| have the constant temptation of digging yourself out of a problem
| just by asking an LLM how will you ever learn anything?
|
| My biggest lessons were from hours of pain and toil, scouring the
| internet. When I finally found the solution, the dopamine hit
| ensured that lesson was burned into my neurons. There is no such
| dopamine hit with LLMs. You vaguely try to understand what it's
| been doing for the last five minutes and try to steer it back on
| course. There is no strife.
|
| I'm only 24 and I think my career would be on a very different
| path if the LLMs of today were available just five years ago.
| eastbound wrote:
| At the beginning of the internet, I used to save all webpages
| where I'd find info, just in case I would be stuck without a
| connection or if the website removed it. I had parts of the
| MDN.
|
| The internet never fell. I bet it'll be the same with AI. You
| will never not have AI.
|
| The big difference is the internet was a liberation movement:
| Everything became open. And free. AI is the opposite: By
| design, everything is closed.
| andoando wrote:
| Ok imagine you went back 30 years and you had a swarm of
| experts around you who you could ask anything you wanted and
| they would even do the work for you if you wanted.
|
| Does this mean youd be incapable of learning anything? Or could
| you possibly learn way more because you had the innate desire
| to learn and understand along with the best tool possible to do
| it?
|
| Its the same thing here. How you use LLMs is all up to your
| mindset. Throughly review and ask questions on what it did, or
| why, ask if we could have done it some other way instead. Hell
| ask it just the questions you need and do it yourself, or dont
| use it at all. I was working on C++ for example with a heavy
| use of mutexs, shared and weak pointers which I havent done
| before. LLM fixed a race condition, and I got to ask it
| precisely what the issue was, to draw a diagram showing what
| was happening in this exact scenario before and after.
|
| I feel like Im learning more because I am doing way more high
| level things now, and spending way less time on the stuff I
| already know or dont care to know (non fundementals, like
| syntax and even libraries/frameworks). For example, I don't
| really give a fuck about being an expert in Spring Security. I
| care about how authentication works as a principal, what
| methods would be best for what, etc but do I want to spend 3
| hours trying to debug the nuances of configuring the Spring
| security library for a small project I dont care about?
| demorro wrote:
| > Does this mean you'd be incapable of learning anything?
|
| Yes. This strikes me as obvious. People don't have the sort
| of impulse control you're implying by default, it has to be
| learnt just like anything else. This sort of environment
| would make you an idiot if it's all you've ever known.
|
| You might as well be saying that you can just explain to
| children why they should eat their vegetables and rely on
| them to be rational actors.
| andoando wrote:
| I see it as being more personality/interest than impulse
| control. A curious/interested person would try and get
| involved and be a part of it, someone uninterested will
| just say what's the point and get by having the work done
| for them.
| cedws wrote:
| It may very well have stunted my learning. What's the point
| of absorbing information when you have a consortium of
| experts available 24/7?
|
| Saying what you said about it being down to being how you use
| LLM comes from a privileged position. You likely already know
| how to code. You likely know how to troubleshoot. Would you
| develop those same skillsets today starting from zero?
| andoando wrote:
| Supposedly because AI has limits and you still have to know
| what you're doing so you can guide it and do it better.
|
| If that's not true, then what's the problem with not
| learning the material? Go do something more productive with
| your time if the personal curiosity isn't good enough. Were
| in a whole new world.
|
| >Saying what you said about it being down to being how you
| use LLM comes from a privileged position. You likely
| already know how to code. You likely know how to
| troubleshoot. Would you develop those same skillsets today
| starting from zero?
|
| This is true, and I can't answer that 100% confidently. I
| imagine I would just be doing more more/complicated things
| and learning higher level concepts. For example, if right
| off the bat I could produce a web app, Id want to deploy it
| somewhere. So Id come across things like ssh, nginx, port
| forwarding, jars, bundles, DNS, authentication, etc. Do
| this a 1000 times just the way I wrote 1000 different
| little functions or programs by hand and you'll no shit
| absorb little here and there as issues come up. Or maybe if
| whats hard a year ago is easy today, Id want to do
| something far more incredibly complex than anything
| anyone's been able to imagine before, and learn in that
| struggle.
|
| Programmers in the 90s were far more apt at understanding
| CPU registers, memory and all sorts of low level stuff.
| Then the abstraction moved up the stack, and then again and
| again. I think same thing will happen.
|
| Also, you can't say Im in a privileged position for already
| knowing how to code and at the same time asking what's the
| point of learning it yourself.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| As an older person, I'm not worried. The world changes all the
| time. People are put people in difficult situations, and they
| have to adapt. "Oh no, how will people learn things?" is not
| that big of a struggle in the grand scheme. We're not burning
| books or giving people lobotomies. People can still learn if
| they want to, easier than ever before. Businesses will adapt,
| people will adapt, by necessity. Things will be very different,
| sure. But then we get used to the difference, and it becomes
| normal.
|
| Kids today couldn't imagine how people used to live just 100
| years ago, like it was the dark ages. People from that age
| would probably look at kids 10 years ago and think, these poor
| children! They don't know how to work hard! They don't know
| anything about life! They're glued to these bizarre light
| machines! Every age is different.
| archmaster wrote:
| I've seen a lot of posts like this one, but this is the first to
| encapsulate how I feel so well.
|
| Honestly, I don't really know what to do. I spent my whole life
| (so far; I'm still very young) falling in love with programming,
| and now I just don't find this agent thing fun at all. But I just
| don't know how to find my niche if using LLMs truly does end up
| being the only way for me to build valuable things with my only
| skills.
|
| It's pretty depressing and very scary. But I appreciate this
| article for at least conveying that so effectively...
| shich wrote:
| The pilot analogy hits different when you consider that pilots
| still train on simulators for exactly this reason -- they're
| legally required to maintain proficiency even when autopilot
| handles 99% of flights.
|
| There's no equivalent mandate for software engineers. Nothing
| stops you from spending years as a pure "prompt pilot" and losing
| the ability to read a stack trace or reason about algorithmic
| complexity. The atrophy is silent and gradual.
|
| The author's suggestion to write code by hand as an educational
| exercise is right but will be ignored by most, because the
| feedback loop for skill atrophy is so delayed. You won't notice
| you've lost the skill until you're debugging something the agent
| made a mess of, under pressure, with no fallback.
| waygtdai wrote:
| Yeah. HN is fucked. It's over with the amount of AI comments.
| Especially recently with more captcha breaking, etc.
|
| Human posters need to start saying obscene things or making
| unsafe/violent statements to ensure the comment isn't just AI
| generated.
| getnormality wrote:
| I think this author could consider thinking of the AI as more
| than just a task rabbit that allows us to not code, not think,
| not understand.
|
| If the LLM is indeed such a master at complex coding tasks that
| we don't understand, why not ask it some questions about how the
| code works?
|
| You can even ask directly about the concern. "I am worried that
| by letting you do everything I am not learning how the system
| works. Could you tell me more about what you did and how I might
| think through it if I needed to do it myself?"
| dh2022 wrote:
| Re: "reviewing code is very different from producing it, and
| surely teaches you less" - I feel this so much when reviewing the
| code one of my coworkers writes. My coworker makes plenty of
| mistakes and I learned the hard way that reviewing his PRs in a
| web page is not enough. These days when I have to review his code
| I download his branch locally and load the entire solution in the
| IDE. I then track his changes and usually find a few things
| wrong.
|
| BTW - my coworker is not AI. It is a flesh-and-bones SWE.
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