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ChrisMarshallNYtoday at 9:36 AM3 repliesview on HN

> agentic coding

In my personal experience, agentic coding wasn’t useful, but using a chat inference, was. I still need to be the critical path, but the LLM has, indeed, become a major force multiplier.

A few minutes ago, I submitted an app for review, that I started work on, alone, in February. The Quality of the new version is astounding. I’m absolutely thrilled.

It’s a full rewrite (backend server, and frontend client) of a fairly large app that’s been shipping for a couple of years, and that took over two years, to originally write.

I wouldn’t have even tried it, without an LLM. That made all the difference. The majority of the work was done with the $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription, but the last few days, as I developed supporting materials and Web sites, I used the $100/month Pro level. After my work, over the last few months, the upgrade was a “no brainer.”

But, at every step of the way, I needed to be there, to intimately review and manage the interaction with the LLM. There’s no way that I could trust it to “just do it.”

I’m sure that, sooner or later (likely sooner), LLMs will have progressed to the point that I can trust them to vibe-code a project like this, but I guarantee, that they aren’t quite there, yet.

To be fair, I know that I may have much higher standards than a fairly significant number of developers, but the end product of my work is about as far from “AI slop” as you can get.


Replies

noduermetoday at 10:13 AM

When it's your own codebase that you know intimately, you obviously don't want it polluted, and you want to continue to understand everything that's there. For rewriting things you understand perfectly, or porting code to different platforms, the LLMs truly are a force multiplier. But that's so different from the way they are used on new projects. Letting them make design decisions is the problem. To make design decisions, you have to understand the system as a whole.

toshtoday at 10:38 AM

you can also situate the agent within your codebase and have it only write things you review (or have it not write/change the code at all)

Krei-setoday at 10:52 AM

> as far from “AI slop” as you can get

as always: no code, no link, not even a description.

Incoming reasons: possible doxx, "internal", etc. pp.

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