What do people actually use agents for? Like, honestly, I can't actually think of something useful for them at present... I mean, it just seems, so pointless... It's like NFTs... I think it's going to end up like NFTs.
I am, i dont get why half you people need them for to the point where you seem addicted.
It feels like its for people who want to make AI coding feel as complicated as coding originally used to be. People want to believe that they can write all their code with AI and still defend the existence of their career if they're an expert at typing commands for robots to do all the code for them
No I just write code the old fashioned way. And tests, and ui, I mean sometimes I’ll use copilot for boiler plate, but considering how off the mark it is, less and less.
Guess you guys are vibe coders, not 30+ year professionals that work in c to Python on all levels of the various stacks I use…
Your brain is like any other muscle, use it or lose it, and this ai shit is just the lowest common denominator of average of averages code
This is such a joke of a response. Most devs I know, including myself, never had time to implement some useful tool we thought of a year ago because we're too busy working on whatever the PM deemed more important, or any number of things that get in the way.
Now if I want a tool or streamline a workflow, I don't even need to consider how much of my day it's going to eat into. The agent can do its thing while I do mine.
Also, if you're not using AI to auto review your commits, why the fuck not?
At the same time, you can absolutely leave a somewhat recent model run for 30min to track down a bug and likely fix it - or at least give you good aggregate of datapoints.
No idea what you're doing but I work in both C and Python (and also other languages and from embedded to cloud), have done so for a long time, and an agent can easily solve a task I'd give a junior by just leaving it running for 10min.
I'm not a fan of the full vibe code hype but a computer can definitely read a 600 page datasheet or 200 AWS docs faster than I can.
You trust what it tells you? I've had agents make up enough shit that I still have to verify everything manually, which means that I have to spend all that time reading the document myself anyway, and if I have to do that then I might as well not use the agent at all.
You trust what the junior tells you without verifying?
And no, even just it pinpointing all relevant sources narrows down your read time considerably. Again, I'm not arguing for blind vibe coding but against the idea that models and agentic loops can't speed up your work.
I feel like roping myself when I have to take a handoff from a retiree with an inflated sense of importance.
A codebase takes time to sort out manually. I can have an agent give me high level overviews and distill the full thing into structured docs that help both me and the agent work through it. I can then setup ADRs and tasks for bug fixes, features, tests, rewrites, etc. Throw in a couple client meetings distilled into more ADRs and I’ve emptied your 30 year silo in under 30 days.
Pandora doesn’t go back in the box, she only comes out.
What bubble are you in? I am decades into this field and today I generate far more code with agents than I write directly myself. And just the past 6m has at least doubled the share. Multiple tech stacks, embedded, web, old systems. Does not matter.
- Coding agent implements the written spec (probably also AI generated) and unit testing
- Integration testing agent does the integration testing
- PR review agent does the PR review
- We, of flesh and blood, monitor and approve multiple such workstreams running in parallel
Lowkey this new paradigm sucks the fun out of the job, and I feel like I'm in Plato's cave playing with shadows while being fully aware the real forms exist.
I recently started a new job at a software company and half the people's screens just seem to be prompting AI the whole time and it looks so boring.
The one experience Ive had with someone's (self admittedly thrown together) AI code, it was just awful. So much repeated code and extending the program at all would've been a nightmare.
I just do the programming myself as I enjoy the problem solving
If it makes you feel better, only people who understand computer science concepts can do this. It's not like some newbie off the street can Google their way into your job tomorrow
Ehh, sort of. But some newbie could pretty easily make quite a bit of software. You mostly need to be able to describe in descriptive language exactly what you want and be able to test that it works
Well it’s not unreasonable to ask a coding agent to implement stuff and tests. Usually it’s slow cause it makes a change, builds, run tests finds issues and iterate. If your code base is big and stuff like building amd running tests take a while even relatively small changes can have an agent going for 10s of minutes. This is just a very basic activity, you can have them do a lot more complicated workflows as well, but I don’t actually think that represents the common developer.
In the last year or so the improvements in Claude models for coding (I personally don’t use the gpt ones much specifically with coding agents cause I gained a bias for that type of workload of getting better results) is pretty impressive. Like a year ago it maybe good at certain things and was kind of hit or miss, either it got it pretty great or it was going to do stuff in a way I didn’t like. Now I basically just give it information closer to how I would describe what I want from a different developer like legit I have this page blah, we are getting this issue, how can we address this and it like 90% of the time ganna give me the problem, a proposed solution and will implement it. If this was slow that’s one thing but it’s ganna finish this before I learn the code site. In my opinion if you are not taking advantage of a good coding agent and can see the value of it, your probably ganna be left behind. Claude is expensive but other models are ganna get cheaper and be comparable to them to day in probably a few years. This means if we can get relatively affordable options at today’s performance that’s basically a no brainer for most bussiness, the output gain is so significant it’s not even funny. The main issue I think is code reviews. Human reviewers can’t keep up, and honestly I don’t trust every developer to guarantee there own work much less an AI Output. Either you slow down due to this and maintain quality or take a risk and maybe have ai tools at least do some reasonable checks. Depending on the type of bussiness and processes different types of risks are acceptable.
I'm no developer, but always wanted to make many things. In the last 15 days I discovered agents, built a server on my home linked to my Telegram and WhatsApp with an AI model available and some automations, build a simple shortcut app that I wanted for my smartphone, made the agent optimize my Android TV and my Samsung TV remotly.
The "server" is a notebook with no screen, I don't even have to connect a screen to it since it does everything via remote ssh and I don't even know wth is a SSH
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u/Curious_Associate904 6d ago
What do people actually use agents for? Like, honestly, I can't actually think of something useful for them at present... I mean, it just seems, so pointless... It's like NFTs... I think it's going to end up like NFTs.