Comment by defatigable

Comment by defatigable 15 hours ago

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I use Augment with Claud Opus 4.5 every day at my job. I barely ever write code by hand anymore. I don't blindly accept the code that it writes, I iterate with it. We review code at my work. I have absolutely found a lot of benefit from my tools.

I've implemented several medium-scale projects that I anticipate would have taken 1-2 weeks manually, and took a day or so using agentic tools.

A few very concrete advantages I've found:

* I can spin up several agents in parallel and cycle between them. Reviewing the output of one while the others crank away.

* It's greatly improved my ability in languages I'm not expert in. For example, I wrote a Chrome extension which I've maintained for a decade or so. I'm quite weak in Javascript. I pointed Antigravity at it and gave it a very open-ended prompt (basically, "improve this extension") and in about five minutes in vastly improved the quality of the extension (better UI, performance, removed dependencies). The improvements may have been easy for someone expert in JS, but I'm not.

Here's the approach I follow that works pretty well:

1. Tell the agent your spec, as clearly as possible. Tell the agent to analyze the code and make a plan based on your spec. Tell the agent to not make any changes without consulting you.

2. Iterate on the plan with the agent until you think it's a good idea.

3. Have the agent implement your plan step by step. Tell the agent to pause and get your input between each step.

4. Between each step, look at what the agent did and tell it to make any corrections or modifications to the plan you notice. (I find that it helps to remind them what the overall plan is because sometimes they forget...).

5. Once the code is completed (or even between each step), I like to run a code-cleanup subagent that maintains the logic but improves style (factors out magic constants, helper functions, etc.)

This works quite well for me. Since these are text-based interfaces, I find that clarity of prose makes a big difference. Being very careful and explicit about the spec you provide to the agent is crucial.

marcus_holmes 9 hours ago

This. I use it for coding in a Rails app when I'm not a Ruby expert. I can read the code, but writing it is painful, and so having the LLM write the code is beneficial. It's definitely faster than if I was writing the code, and probably produces better code than I would write.

I've been a professional software developer for >30 years, and this is the biggest revolution I've seen in the industry. It is going to change everything we do. There will be winners and losers, and we will make a lot of mistakes, as usual, but I'm optimistic about the outcome.

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  • defatigable 9 hours ago

    Agreed. In the domains where I'm an expert, it's a nice productivity boost. In the domains where I'm not, it's transformative.

    As a complete aside from the question of productivity, these coding tools have reawakened a love of programming in me. I've been coding for long enough that the nitty gritty of everyday programming just feels like a slog - decrypting compiler errors, fixing type checking issues, factoring out helper functions, whatever. With these tools, I get to think about code at a much higher level. I create designs and high level ideas and the AI does all the annoying detail work.

    I'm sure there are other people for whom those tasks feel like an interesting and satisfying puzzle, but for me it's been very liberating to escape from them.

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    • ZitchDog 2 hours ago

      > In the domains where I'm an expert, it's a nice productivity boost. In the domains where I'm not, it's transformative.

      Is it possible that the code you are writing isn't good, but you don't know it because you're not an expert?

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jesse__ 10 hours ago

> I've implemented several medium-scale projects that I anticipate would have taken 1-2 weeks manually

A 1-week project is a medium-scale project?! That's tiny, dude. A medium project for me is like 3 months of 12h days.

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  • defatigable 10 hours ago

    You are welcome to use whatever definition of "small/medium/large" you like. Like you, 1-2 weeks is also far from the largest project I've worked on. I don't think that's particularly relevant to the point of my post.

    The point that I'm trying to emphasize is that I've had success with it on projects of some scale, where you are implementing (e.g.) multiple related PRs in different services. I'm not just using it on very tightly scoped tasks like "implement this function".

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  • drewstiff 8 hours ago

    Well a medium project for me takes 3 years, so obviously I am the best out of everyone /s

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laserlight 5 hours ago

I wouldn't consider the proposed workflow agentic. When you review each step, give feedback after each step, it's simply development with LLMs.

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  • defatigable 3 hours ago

    Interesting. What would make the workflow "agentic" in your mind? The AI implementing the task fully autonomously, never getting any human feedback?

    To me "agentic" in this context essentially that the LLM has the ability to operate autonomously, so execute tools on my behalf, etc. So for example my coding agents will often run unit tests, run code generation tools, etc. I've even used my agents to fix issues with git pre-commit hooks, in which case they've operated in a loop, repeatedly trying to check in code and fixing errors they see in the output.

    So in that sense they are theoretically capable of one-shot implementing any task I set them to, their quality is just not good enough yet to trust them to. But maybe you mean something different?

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    • laserlight an hour ago

      IMHO, agentic workflow is the autonomous execution of a detailed plan. Back-and-forth between LLM and developer is fine in the planning stage. Then, the agent is supposed to overcome any difficulties or devise solutions to unplanned situations. Otherwise, Cursor had been able to develop in a tight loop of writing and running tests, followed by fixing bugs, before “agentic” became a buzzword.

      Perhaps “agentic” initially referred to this simple loop, but the milestone was achieved so quickly that the meaning shifted. Regardless, I could be wrong.

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monkeydust 8 hours ago

1. And 2. I.e. creating a spec which is the source of truth (or spec driven development) is key to getting anything production grade from our experience.

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  • defatigable 3 hours ago

    Yes. This was the key thing I learned that let me set the agents loose on larger tasks. Before I started iterating on specs with them, I mostly had them doing very small scale, refactor-this-function style tasks.

    The other advice I've read that I haven't yet internalized as much is to use an "adversarial" approach with the LLMs: i.e. give them a rigid framework that they have to code against. So, e.g., generate tests that the code has to work against, or sample output that the code has to perfectly match. My agents do write tests as part of their work, and I use them to verify correctness, but I haven't updated my flow to emphasize that the agents should start with those, and iterate on them before working on the main implementation.

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tkgally 14 hours ago

Great advice.

> Tell the agent your spec, as clearly as possible.

I have recently added a step before that when beginning a project with Claude Code: invoke the AskUserQuestionTool and have it ask me questions about what I want to do and what approaches I prefer. It helps to clarify my thinking, and the specs it then produces are much better than if I had written them myself.

I should note, though, that I am a pure vibe coder. I don't understand any programming language well enough to identify problems in code by looking at it. When I want to check whether working code produced by Claude might still contain bugs, I have Gemini and Codex check it as well. They always find problems, which I then ask Claude to fix.

None of what I produce this way is mission-critical or for commercial use. My current hobby project, still in progress, is a Japanese-English dictionary:

https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1

https://www.tkgje.jp/

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  • defatigable 10 hours ago

    Great idea! That's actually the very next improvement I was planning on making to my coding flow: building a sub agent that is purely designed to study the codebase and create a structured implementation plan. Every large project I work on has the same basic initial steps (study the codebase, discuss the plan with me, etc) so it makes sense to formalize this in an agent I specialize for the purpose.

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    • marcus_holmes 9 hours ago

      Is it just me, or does every post starting with "Great Idea!" or "Great point!" or "You're so right!" or similar just sound like an LLM is posting?

      Or is this a new human linguistic tic that is being caused by prolonged LLM usage?

      Or is it just me?

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      • defatigable 9 hours ago

        :-) I feel you. Perhaps I should have ended my post with "Would you like me to construct a good prompt for your planning agent?" to really drive us into the uncanny valley?

        (My writing style is very dry and to the point, you may have noticed. I looked at my post and thought, "Huh, I should try and emotionally engage with this poster, we seem like we're having a shared experience." And so I figured, heck, I'll throw in an enthusiastic interjection. When I was in college, my friends told me I had "bonsai emotions" and I suppose that still comes through in my writing style...)

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solaris2007 12 hours ago

[flagged]

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  • djmips 9 hours ago

    "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes"

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  • defatigable 11 hours ago

    I've never had a job where writing Javascript has been the primary language (so far it's been C++/Java/Golang). The JS Chrome Extension is a fun side project. Using Augment in a work context, I'm primarily using it for Golang and Python code, languages where I'm pretty proficient but AI tools give me a decent efficiency boost.

    I understand the emotional satisfaction of letting loose an easy snarky comment, of course, but you missed the mark I'm afraid.

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    • solaris2007 7 hours ago

      [flagged]

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      • christophilus 6 hours ago

        > If you are any good with those four languages, you are leagues ahead of anyone who does Javascript full time.

        That is a priggish statement, and comes across as ignorant.

        I’ve been paid to program in many different languages over the years. Typescript is what I choose for most tasks these days. I haven’t noticed any real difference between my past C#, C++, C, Java, Ruby, etc programming peers and my current JavaScript ones.

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        • solaris2007 5 hours ago

          > That is a priggish statement

          A cursory glance at the definition of "prig" shows that what I wrote there is categorically not. You should at least try to look up that word and if you look it up and still don't get it then what you have is a reading comprehension issue.

          > Typescript is what I choose for most tasks these days.

          So you're smart on this, at least. Cantrill said it really well, Typescript brought "fresh water" to Javascript.

          > haven’t noticed any real difference between my past C#, C++, C, Java, Ruby, etc programming peers and my current JavaScript ones.

          You might still be on their level. I see that you didn't mention Rust or at least GoLang. Given the totality of your responses, you're certainly not writing any safe C (not ever).

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  • molteanu 11 hours ago

    That's a very good point.

    The OP is "quite weak at JavaScript" but their AI "vastly improved the quality of the extension." Like, my dude, how can you tell? Does the code look polished, it looks smart, the tests pass, or what?! How can you come forward and be the judge of something you're not an expert in?

    I mean, at this point, I'm beginning to be skeptical about half the content posted online. Anybody can come up with any damn story and make it credible. Just the other day I found out about reddit engagement bots, and I've seen some in the wild myself.

    I'm waiting for the internet bubble to burst already so we can all go back to our normal lives, where we've left it 20 years or so ago.

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    • defatigable 10 hours ago

      How can I tell? Yes, the code looks quite a bit more polished. I'm not expert enough in JS to, e.g., know the cleanest method to inspect and modify the DOM, but I can look at code that does and tell if the approach it's using is sensible or not. Surely you've had the experience of a domain where you can evaluate the quality of the end product, even if you can't create a high quality product on your own?

      Concretely in this case, I'd implemented an approach that used jQuery listeners to listen for DOM updates. Antigravity rewrote it to an approach that avoided the jQuery dependency entirely, using native MutationObservers. The code is sensible. It's noticeably more performant than the approach I crafted by hand. Antigravity allowed me to easily add a number of new features to my extension that I would have found tricky to add by hand. The UI looks quite a bit nicer than before I used AI tools to update it. Would these enhancements have been hard for an expert in Chrome extensions to implement? Probably not. But I'm not that expert, and AI coding tools allowed me to do them.

      That was not actually the main thrust of my post, it's just a nice side benefit I've experienced. In the main domain where I use coding tools, at work, I work in languages where I'm quite a bit more proficient (Golang/Python). There, the quality of code that the AI tools generate is not better than I write by hand. The initial revisions are generally worse. But they're quite a bit faster than I write by hand, and if I iterate with the coding tools I can get to implementations that are as good as I would write by hand, and a lot faster.

      I understand the bias towards skepticism. I have no particular dog in this fight, it doesn't bother me if you don't use these tools. But OP asked for peoples' experiences so I thought I'd share.

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    • achierius 11 hours ago

      JavaScript isn't the only programming language around. I'm not the strongest around with JS either but I can figure it out as necessary -- knowing C/C++/Java/whatever means you can still grok "this looks better than that" for most cases.

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      • defatigable 10 hours ago

        Yep. I have plenty of experience in languages that use C-style syntax, enough to easily understand code written in other languages that occur nearby in the syntactical family tree. I'm not steeped in JS enough to know the weird gotchas of the type system, or know the standard library well, etc. But I can read the code fine.

        If I'd asked an AI coding tool to write something up for me in Haskell, I would have no idea if it had done a good job.

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      • esailija 8 hours ago

        I don't think so. Imagine it was vice versa, someone saying they knew JS and were weak at C/C++/Java.

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        • defatigable 2 hours ago

          This doesn't sound right to me. If someone who were expert in JS looked at a relatively simple C++ program, I think they could reasonably well tell if the quality of code were good or not. They wouldn't be able to, e.g., detect bugs from default value initialization, memory leaks, etc. But so long as the code didn't do any crazy templating stuff they'd be able to analyze it at a rough "this algorithm seems sensible" level".

          Analogously I'm quite proficient at C++, and I can easily look at a small JS program and tell if it's sensible. But if you give me even a simple React app I wouldn't be able to understand it without a lot of effort (I've had this experience...)

          I agree with your broad point: C/C++/Java are certainly much more complex than JS and I would expect someone expert in them to have a much easier time picking up JS than the reverse. But given very high overlap in syntax between the four I think anyone who's proficient in one can grok the basics of the others.

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