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just want to remind HN that it was as little as a year when I mentioned I used LLMs to do all my coding, totally hands off and people here found it a curiosity. One year later and its madness to even contemplate coding manually.

Im not complaining Im just pointing out how quickly the overton window is shifting.

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It's not the overton window, it's the capabilities of the models that have changed significantly in 1 year.
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I disagree. For me I had already been using hands off ocding for about 2 years by that point.
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> For me

Obviously that's not the case for everybody. 3 years ago, LLMs were very far from producing the quality of code I wanted in my domain.

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Hey will you share your workflow and how you get LLMs to build correct things for you (or inspite of you)?
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If you’re using the latest models( Opus/Fable/Astra/ maybe Sol) and the default harness, along with a little guidance against the worst tendencies like over-writing tests, you really shouldn’t be getting the wrong things built. Like a coworker, you can’t throw it blind into a monster codebase without some guidance, but otherwise the latest models genuinely just work TM.
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Testing, testing, and more testing. In the project I'm working on right now, about 2/3 of the code is in one way or another related to testing. As a human coder, I'd never spend that much time on building test harnesses, automating regressions, writing unit tests, etc, but it's cheap when you can have a robot do it.
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So you assume code written by the agent canno be trusted? But how comes you are trusting the tests?
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At my work we still have a QA dept that runs the manual test suites before each release. We have also automated almost all of those manual tests and they gate every merge to mainline.

Things are still found but normally it is a new test case or an edge condition we don’t have an automated test for. The ever growing e2e suite has reduced the amount of regressions pretty drastically.

EDIT: I forgot to note that automated e2e tests were always the answer to improving quality. AI has just made it cheap to have several layers of test coverage.

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To start, you make it a rule that every test must pass with the fix being tested, and it must fail if the fix is missing.
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You of course use another AI to test your tests, have you been living under a rock? /s
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How are these /s posts even allowed? You contributed nothing to the conversation other than noise.
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thanks for the insight throwaway
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> One year later and its madness to even contemplate coding manually...

Seriously, why do people assume that what they feel should be how everyone else should be feeling?

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I think it's called Normative Cognition or something.

Like: I'm normal, and I do X. Therefore other normal people will also do X. It's the basis for in-group/out-group. We're all normal and they are not. (for some definition of normal).

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How are you handling all the errors that are hidden in code you can not understand?
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More LLM, duh
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You give it time....the same way Technical debt is code you chose not to clean up....your Vibe Debt for code you never understood in the first place... will come through.
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I dont think so man, it havent really had any issues that Ive noticed
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Have you asked the people downstream of your bot’s work?
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deleted
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I heard: This I/O 7/1 ARM loan is so cheap let's buy more house.
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I am sure it’s all so good that these incidents should not take more than 5 minutes to resolve. Don’t get me wrong, I am one of the people who would look at you suspiciously a year ago and only in the last year “saw the light”. You were ahead. But that doesn’t mean that at some point you will not overshoot. What we witness today we haven’t witnessed in some time. People also made horrible software but they enriched it with hole plugging hacks that made it run, mostly. AI may build better software but who is plugging the holes. At least today no one. In 1 or 5 years maybe AI. In the meantime, we need to plug some holes and they are not as easy to spot when we are not the ones who left them there.
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Madness? I didn't think we'd gone that far...
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So either I am mad or you are all mad, time will tell
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"Overton window"? It's just developers being obtuse, short-sighted and slow.

It was obvious in 2023 and it is obvious now yet we still have people in denial even today. These people need AI to take over the world and threatening them with eternal suffering before they will change their minds even a bit.

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May I ask why you care so much? Some people like hand-coding, they are free to do whatever they want, stop being so weirdly angry and controlling about what people do/how they do it.
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"It was obvious then, and it is obvious now: I am always right, I can predict the future, whoever disagrees with me is wrong"
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Don't forget the "it is inevitable" and "people who disagree with me will be punished and humiliated"
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[flagged]
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Yes, but my company does not pay me every 5 years. I don't know about you, but if I wait 5 years, I won't get a salary in the meantime.

If I wait until tomorrow, though, my company won't see the difference.

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Sure, but depending on what your job is it can make the work feel even more meaningless than it was prior to LLMs.

All the work most people are doing it just going to be Ctrl+A deleted and replaced with someone else's LLM slop using Opus 8 in an afternoon.

All the shit people are building right now just feel ephemeral, like its going to float away on a breeze.

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Well it's getting philosophical. Even before AI, I would argue that the vast majority of software was meaningless. Actually the most successful software on Earth is hurting society and the environment, in exchange for profit for a few humans.

I don't know any software engineer who can say "if I was not doing what I do, society would get a little worse".

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The folk keeping Wikipedia running?
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Maybe not part of the "vast majority"? The idea of "the vast majority" is that it's not "everybody".
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Of course not. I was responding to your second paragraph.
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Oh, I see. Well I don't know any software engineer who works at Wikipedia :-).
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I console myself that while the products we make are useless and probably even harmful the activity itself just represents the world Geist familiarizing itself with computation and its possibilities and thus growing richer in the process.

In the worst case.. sometimes you learn what's best by experiencing what's not.

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[dead]
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sad.
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Well it's not just software engineers. The majority of people in developed countries work in offices. And when you work in an office, it's highly likely that your work is not fundamentally useful.
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> And when you work in an office, it's highly likely that your work is not fundamentally useful.

This seems wildly inaccurate.

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Well, for some definition of useful of course. If you find it wildly inaccurate, maybe you don't have the definition that matches :-).
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You might be right in the end, but the middle of a massive outage probably at least somewhat exacerbated by LLMs, being debugged by (presumably) human software engineers is kind of a weird time to make this point
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Like to burn billions of tokens? For sure!
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