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ungreased0675today at 12:48 PM2 repliesview on HN

I’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.


Replies

jvanderbottoday at 1:15 PM

Sure, but even worse, is the state-of-the-art: they use a cli agent and the "copy-paste, try to run, paste error, try to run" loop is called "Agentic engineering." Now we have to believe they're 10/10?

I see no difference there except speed at the cost of whatever little understanding may have been gained by the manual inspection between steps.

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tdecktoday at 2:38 PM

This is my exact process nowadays when debugging some weird Linux wifi driver issue or something that came up after upgrade.

But that's because I don't have any real familiarity with the systems involved and I don't expect that gaining such familiarity will benefit me. If I am working on a system or product I'm responsible for at my job, it should be a different situation.