alt Hacker NewsI mean, it might depend, but many of the most common complaints about LLM coding (most notably hallucination) are essentially solved problems if you're using agents. Whatever works for you! I don't even like autocomplete, so I sympathize with not liking agents.
If it helps, for context: I'll go round and round with an agent until I've got roughly what I want, and then I go through and beat everything into my own idiom. I don't push code I don't understand and most of the code gets moved or reworked a bit. I don't expect good structure from LLMs (but I also don't invest the time to improve structure until I've done a bunch of edit/compile/test cycles).
I think of LLMs mostly as a way of unsticking and overcoming inertia (and writing tests). "Writing code", once I'm in flow, has always been pleasant and fast; the LLMs just get me to that state much faster.
I'm sure training data matters, but I think static typing and language tooling matters much more. By way of example: I routinely use LLMs to extend intensely domain-specific code internal to our project.
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> ...many of the most common complaints about LLM coding (most notably hallucination) are essentially solved problems if you're using agents
Inconsistency and crap code quality aren't solved yet, and these make the agent workflow worse because the human only gets to nudge the AI in the right direction very late in the game. The alternative, interactive, non-agentic workflows allow for more AI-hand-holding early, and better code quality, IMO.
Agents are fine if no human is going to work on the (sub)system going forward, and you only care about the shiny exterior without opening the hood to witness the horrors within.
> but many of the most common complaints about LLM coding (most notably hallucination) are essentially solved problems if you're using agents.
I have definitely not seen this in my experience (with Aider, Claude and Gemini). While helping me debug an issue, Gemini added a !/bin/sh line to the middle of the file (which appeared to break things), and despite having that code in the context didn't realise it was the issue.
OTOH, when asking for debugging advice in a chat window, I tend to get more useful answers, as opposed to a half-baked implementation that breaks other things. YMMV, as always.