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mikkupikkutoday at 1:41 PM3 repliesview on HN

You're fooling yourself. It's very easy to get demonstrably working results in an afternoon that would take weeks at least without coding agents. Demonstrably working, as in you can prove the code actually works by then putting it to use. I had a coding agent write an entire declarative GUI library for mpv userscripts, rendering all widgets with ASS subtitles, then proceeded to prove to my satisfaction that it does in fact work by using it to make a node editor for constructing ffmpeg filter graphs and an in-mpv nonlinear video editor. All of this is stuff I already knew how to do in practice, had intended to do one day for years now, but never bit the bullet because I knew it would turn into weeks of me pouring over auto-generated ASS doing things it was never intended to do to figure out why something is rendering subtly wrong. Fairly straightforward but a ton of bitch work. The LLM blasted through it like it was nothing. Fooling myself? The code works, I'm using it, you're fooling yourself.


Replies

dgb23today at 7:39 PM

That’s actually an amazing case of agents. I love programming, but be honest, there are a lot of tasks like this that are just very time consuming and not interesting at all.

zozbot234today at 2:00 PM

> Demonstrably working, as in you can prove the code actually works by then putting it to use.

That's not how you prove that code works properly and isn't going to fail due to some obscure or unforessen corner case. You need actual proof that's driven by the code's overall structure. Humans do this at least informally when they code, AI's can't do that with any reliability, especially not for non-trivial projects (for reasons that are quite structural and hard to change) so most coding agents simply work their way iteratively to get their test results to pass. That's not a robust methodology.

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bachmeiertoday at 2:23 PM

> Fairly straightforward but a ton of bitch work. The LLM blasted through it like it was nothing.

One might argue that this is a substitute for metaprogramming, not software developers.

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