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Comments (76)

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  headcanon
  I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe - my company has fully adopted agentic coding, we're working with:- large codebases- business critical software for clients that don't tolerate downtime- agentic and classical featuresWe still collaborate well, we still care about quality, we still have good knowledge of the codebase, but I haven't written a single line of code myself in over a year.We have not had a single incident that I'm aware of where we shipped a slop and it created downtime.We're building a "software factory" that is currently handling low-level chore tickets and merging about 1/3rd of our PRs. A year from now I imagine it will be doing significantly more, and I don't think anyone is going to get fired because of it (if anything we'll keep hiring more).I don't see this as an either/or thing. If there is some hidden ocean of slop that we're bound to fall into I don't see it anywhere. Where is the disparity?
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  BatchJob
  Its inspiring to see folks putting effort into verbalizing the conflicts and unexpected side effects of working with LLMs. Our feelings really do matter at the end of the day.But I dont know if they matter to the employers who can only see LLMs as "free milk", and developers as the "milking machine".
• advael
  I agree with everything in this article (though I am still optimistic that LLMs will help otherwise unskilled people write personal software), but unless labor starts meaningfully organizing and pushing back against the corporate power that causes these outcomes, things will only get worseLike we can say "this sucks" twenty thousand times, but what's the plan? Maybe some of the senior people who can be productive because of our knowledge who may cease to exist as a class resulting in a century of slop should get together and talk praxis. Otherwise all these articles are just training data
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  tschellenbach
  It is very possible to use these tools in the wrong way. Companies that understand how to use AI will do better, those that have these 4 problems won't.- AI should accelerate your understanding of the codebase and technical concepts. - Skills should ensure a higher quality of code than you could create without AI - Engineers should stay responsible for the code they product. - The available time freed up should be used for communication, product and marketing research. The definition of an engineer who just writes code is something that's going away.Unless something is so simple that the AI can run it autonomously. There are actually many projects like that these days. And in those cases not looking at the code like DHH does is also a viable strategy.
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  paularmstrong
  My work Slack channels are ghost-towns. People are logged in, but they're never saying anything. I often find myself wondering if anyone is even working. PRs have their names on them, even the review comments are posted from _their_ accounts, but it is obvious that Claude wrote everything from the code, the unnecessarily verbose change summary, to their comments. Even their replies to my change requests start with "You're right — …".I miss the days when the engineering Slack channels had long threads of new and interesting ways to do things, discussions of something we could do next to make work easier or fix long-standing issues. We used to build up our own knowledge of who was good at specific things, what they'd be interested in working on. Now everyone just has their slop-machine spit out every piece of a change for the entire stack without paying any attention to the details.
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  sashank_1509
  Yeah it’s fucked, our job has been destroyed from a fun team-based intellectual activity to being a button pusher. I imagine something similar happened to tailors who became factory sweatshop workers.No point crying about it or coping that some bubble will pop and the genie will go back in the bottle. I’m pretty confident that’s not happening, though in the distant future some society will recognize that everything that can be automated should not be automated, that society will look very different and probably won’t happen in my lifetime (it will for one, I predict bring back tailors too).So here’s my solution, leave the field. If what you enjoyed most was creative problem solving then moving to a field that enables that is the best solution. Yes the next Ruby on Rails app will involve even lesser creativity than before, but is that the situation for the next good aeroplane? Flying car? Small modular nuclear reactor. I suspect just button pushing for that won’t work nearly as well and that’s my plan anyway.
• integrallis
  The current "slow down" is a back-handed attempt to let the world catch up with the amount of slop that has been generated. The speed and time-to-market bill is piling up and in the next 5 years there will no humans that can understand this mess. So agentic SWE systems, need to change. Either we trust the validation layer at the end, or we take back control and also learn along the way.
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  empath75
  The team thing is killing us right now. Everyone is just kind of silo'd with their agents and they present these entire complex units of work with no input from the rest of the team, and by then it's too late to fix.
• hodder
  It misses the single most powerful positive though. It is incredibly fast and empowering to the point that putting up with the four horsemen is easily justified. Coding by hand is largely in the rearview mirror unless you are more interested in the craft of writing code than simply using code to get things done.
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  chanux
  > Agents weaken the social fabric of engineering teams by reducing interpersonal communication, increasing self-reliance, and hindering skill expression.I have a feeling that this is true and it's a bit sad.
• demibabs
  > And that’s true: nobody wants to see how John prompts. There is something repulsive and fundamentally unsexy about talking to an agent. It feels fine when you are doing it, but others... ugh, get a chatroom. Their prompts are cringe; their agents are weird. Like looking at someone else’s TikTok feed.So real. There’s still something fundamentally embarrassing about saying you used AI to do something. This leads to a pet theory of mine that most people use AI far more than they say they do.
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  clintonb
  I've struggled with these feelings over the past week as I take some time away from work and the LLM madness. I miss discussions and debates about architecture and solutions to problems. I miss the curiosity and learning!It seems LLM usage has eroded whatever facades existed and made some of us believe we were part of teams or organizations that shared these values, or culture, I'm seeing expressed in the article and comments. Perhaps _we_ were the ones hallucinating the values existed in the first place?I don't begrudge folks who want to solve problems by any means, and not worry about the alienation or deskilling. That's their right. However, it's now clear to me that I have to make a conscious effort to express what my own values are and to build/join and organization that shares them.
• 131hn
  « i’m a smart, but flesh limited human. Split this refactoring slop into an incremental , iterative 2h (1h? 15min) review window sessions.If you cant do that. Destroy the PR and blame the pilot.And insert some hidden random jokes for me to keep focus»
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  natino
  I'm a senior software engineer at my company. The AI slop is so bad that it's causing myself code review fatigue. The engineers are also intermediate with 3-4 years of experience.I had one guy report me to his manager because I wasn't letting him merge his PR in because of a critical bug with his code that his precious ai didn't understand.
• anon
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• slopinthebag
  Oh god that article about Astra is so relatable. I was wondering why it was refusing to write any whitespace and was just spitting out the worst code imaginable, now I know it's not just my harness or prompts. It's truly a horrible coding model.
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  simianwords
  My work slack used to have lots of questions. Now very less. That should be celebrated because we don’t have to depend on anyone. But I guess you can paint anything in a bad way.
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  JV00
  Disagree on the slop point. By now the code of frontier models works well, and the need to read it is gone. The Claude word salad problem was pretty much solved with the 5.5 opus release.The other 3 points made in article make sense though.
• bilater
  Again, the assumption that forms the crux of these objections of all of these is that we're going to hit some plateau where we are going to need humans to come back in, reskill, retake over, etc. I don't think most people are prepared for the fact that that's just a midwit problem and the AI will just keep getting better and won't need humans in the loop.
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  resters
  The backlash against agentic coding comes from the split that has already existed among professional software engineers. The ones who are most resistant to it are the ones for whom it has been "just a job", but the ones who love it are the ones who love solving problems. It's now possible for a small team (one person, a few) to solve truly daunting software problems with the help of agentic methods. If you were a 9 to 5er who valued craft but didn't dream about solving problems, AI is a buzz kill.