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8notetoday at 3:17 AM2 repliesview on HN

its not necessarily better, but its certainly good enough, if youre already used to distributing work to different people

the scale of code doesnt really matter that much, as long as a programmer can point it at the right places.

i think actually you want to be really involved in the skeleton, since from what ive seen the agent is quite bad at making skeletons that it can do a good job extending.

if you get the base right though, the agent can make precise changes in large code bases


Replies

jdw64today at 3:23 AM

Thinking about it, I think what is interesting about the output of agentic coding is this:

I mostly agree with the general tendency that it starts to break down as the context grows. But there is also a difference in how people evaluate it. Some people say agents are good at building the skeleton, while others say they are better at extending an existing structure.

I think this depends on the setup, and it is ultimately a trade-off.

In my case, I usually work on codebases around 60,000 LoC. The programs I deliver are generally between 60,000 and 80,000 lines of code. I think I can fairly call myself a specialist at that scale, since I have personally delivered close to 40 projects of that size.

At that scale, I felt that agentic coding was actually very good at building the initial skeleton.

I do not know what kind of work you usually do, but if your work involves highly precise, low-level tasks, then I can understand why you might feel differently.

In my case, I mostly assemble high-level libraries and frameworks into working systems, so that may be why I experience it this way.

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energy123today at 5:54 AM

I find LLMs are good at skeletons but only if you are tedious about writing down what you want before you start. Then give that text to GPT 5.5 Pro, and be prepared for a number of iterations.