Ask HN: Are agents _still_ writing most of your code?

6 points by etamponi 44 days ago | 4 comments

At the beginning it was very cool to see them write a lot of code for me, in particular while I was ramping up on a new codebase. But I am seeing myself using agents less and less as I get more acquainted with the codebase. I might use them as a glorified copy n paste or to get a tool running. And they're indeed very useful to get the gist of a part of the code I don't fully grasp. But I am back to writing I'd say 90% of the code myself. Is this your experience as well?

cableshaft 44 days ago |

I'm using them more and more right now, but I only started really diving into agent-based A.I. coding the past couple of months.

It's especially nice after work, as I tend to be pretty low energy after work lately, and have a hard time sitting at a computer and coding even more.

With agent-based I can write up some medium-level detail specs (I'd do more if I need more, but it seems to be fine with what I give it most of the time), fire it off, and do something else away from the screen for a while, before checking in on it and reviewing it.

About the only thing I've been coding on my personal projects recently has been creating and checking in assets or putting in data.

Like I'm working on a card game and it was able to come up with something data-wise that was good enough for placeholders, but now it needs to be accurate, so I'm going in and changing it manually.

al_borland 44 days ago |

They never really wrote that much for me. If it’s a little one-off thing that it can one-shot and I don’t need to maintain it, cool. For the meat of my job, the agents have never worked well enough to put my name on what they write. It’s a tool, not a worker, I use the Ask function more than the Agent.

bbangjo 44 days ago |

at first, I was feeling same way but after I gave agent knowledge about our codebase, It works really well so nowdays actually I really don't write code myself

linesofcode 44 days ago |

Not most. All of it.