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I agree that framing and scoping tasks is becoming a real joy. The great thing about this strategy is there's a point at which you can scope something small enough that it's hard for the AI to get it wrong and it's easy enough for you as a human to comprehend what it's done and verify that it's correct.

I'm starting to think of projects now as a tree structure where the overall architecture of the system is the main trunk and from there you have the sub-modules, and eventually you get to implementations of functions and classes. The goal of the human in working with the coding agent is to have full editorial control of the main trunk and main sub-modules and delegate as much of the smaller branches as possible.

Sometimes you're still working out the higher-level architecture, too, and you can use the agent to prototype the smaller bits and pieces which will inform the decisions you make about how the higher-level stuff should operate.

by audience_mem3 hours ago|

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[Edit: I may have been replying to another comment in my head as now I re-read it and I'm not sure I've said the same thing as you have. Oh well.]

I agree. This is how I see it too. It's more like a shortcut to an end result that's very similar (or much better) than I would've reached through typing it myself.

The other day I did realise that I'm using my experience to steer it away from bad decisions a lot more than I noticed. It feels like it does all the real work, but I have to remember it's my/our (decades of) experience writing code playing a part also.

I'm genuinely confused when people come in at this point and say that it's impossible to do this and produce good output and end results.

by meowface3 hours ago|

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I feel the same, but, also, within like three years this might look very different. Maybe you'll give the full end-to-end goal upfront and it just polls you when it needs clarification or wants to suggest alternatives, and it self-manages cleanly self-delegating.

Or maybe something quite different but where these early era agentic tooling strategies still become either unneeded or even actively detrimental.

by zxor2 hours ago|

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> it just polls you when it needs clarification

I think anyone who has worked on a serious software project would say, this means it would be polling you constantly.

Even if we posit that an LLM is equivalent to a human, humans constantly clarify requirements/architecture. IMO on both of those fronts the correct path often reveals itself over time, rather than being knowable from the start.

So in this scenario it seems like you'd be dealing with constant pings and need to really make sure you're understanding of the project is growing with the LLM's development efforts as well.

To me this seems like the best-case of the current technology, the models have been getting better and better at doing what you tell it in small chunks but you still need to be deciding what it should be doing. These chunks don't feel as though they're getting bigger unless you're willing to accept slop.