alt Hacker NewsThinking 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.
Replies
I think it's just the context in which it's working in.
1m lines of html are infinitely more conducive for a language model to work in than 10k lines of complex multithreaded low level code.
A lot of coding is just rehashing the same concepts in slightly novel ways, language models work great in this context as code gen machines.
The hope is that we can focus our efforts on harder problems, using language models as a tool to make us more productive and more powerful, and with the advancements open weight models have made, also less reliant on big tech companies to do so.
The coding agents are good at growing code.
Like a child growing up!
Also, like a cancer.
Similar process, different outcomes.