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- Hacker News
- This article somewhat reflects my experience with autonomous agentic coding. I've run several experiments with similar results: the agent burns through all my tokens while making very little progress, or produces something unacceptable.
So I'd rather micromanage the process step by step. It takes more of my time, but the result is much, much closer to what I actually wanted.
by dzhar11 - Hyperbolic, but I'm seeing hints of this – Models refusing to do pair work with an engineer and trust their input, instead mandating having full control over something. Friends switching back from Fable/Opus 5 to Opus 4.8 just so they can have some input.
Anthropic especially right now seem to be optimising for doing the whole task with no input. That's fine when that's the only task, and it's fine when you don't care how the sausage is made, but it's not fine for actual software engineering.
by danpalmer - I’ve never had an agent fail to write the actual implementation. Has it done so badly, yes, but not nothing but tests. This sounds to me like a rare case that doesn’t generalize.
If the general idea is that these agents write too many tests, sure I guess? ‘Too many tests’ doesn’t sound like a failure case of engineering to me; typically software has had too few tests. Also, a lot of the power of these agents is their ability to self-verify and correct, which the test loop is a part of.
Nobody is making you pay this supposed tax. Just tell it not to write tests.
by markbao - I tried, but I’m not sure I understand. The vibe tax is caused by the model trying to one-shot everything and doing so requires unnecessary tests? How are vibe coders training the model over months? Do you mean their sessions and preferences are being fed back into the RL?by alehlopeh
- I feel this, yes.
In effect, I’ve always wanted a pair programmer agent, not a zero to one programming agent. Unfortunately models these days are mostly of the latter kind and it has caused a major disruption in the way I work. I’d much rather appreciate a small model making fast and specific edits that I ask if it, rather than ingesting 20 files to make changes, and then starting to write tests, etc.
- Most, if not all, of the code in the company I work in is written by AI. Our tests are useless. We have tests that make sure that mongoose schemas are creating the collections defined in them. We have tests that check that zod shcemas parse objects currently. Every PR, even if 1 line change, will drag 25 file changes because our tests are so ad-hoc, so verbose, and so incompatible with each other. Imagine how the codebase is looking... This is a badge of incompetence for the company I work with, and prob to the entire tech world.
The funny part is? This makes our managers and investors proud, every PR is bigger, we make x3 more PRs (wheres the promised x10).
When they say this is the death of software engineering, this is what they mean.
by localhoster - i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt.
There's a reason why we talk about software development lifecycle, design, architecture, testing ... It's because it's been the most reliable way to build and ship software. We shouldn't expect discard this and expect agents to perform well outside of this.
I'm treating LLM agents as junior devs who happen to have vast knowledge of software engineering. As their team leader i make them go through planning, implementation, bug sweeping cycles using strict workflows. And it works quite well, i've been working on several large projects (1M+ LOC java,typescript,c/c++) and by any measure the projects are healthy. Sure the code isn't that beautiful, sure i'd have written things differently but it's pretty good nonetheless.
Shameless plug here: i've been also working on https://kodfactory.com, the code factory i've built to work on these large projects with workflows, reviews, etc ... I'm cleaning things up to open source it later.
by guybedo - I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts.
My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding.
And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application that I intend to open source. It's about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline. I'm doing 24x7 mutation testing on a dedicated box against the accounting engine and temporal systems. I even have specialized agents doing audits against Regulation Z (US banking law) criteria so the app models the required behavior of banks.
Most of my complaints about everything are nits, like the overly verbose and dense way LLMs communicate with me. Or their predisposition to add, add, and add more stuff when proper engineering practices are more often about subtraction (but I've built mitigation guardrails against a lot of that).
by ad_fontes