747s and Coding Agents

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...

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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

  > 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

  [...] since I work at an AI lab and stand to gain a great deal if AI follows through on its economic promise.

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