Comment by edanm

Comment by edanm 11 hours ago

12 replies

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Serious question - what kind of example would help at this point?

Here are a sample of (IMO) extremely talented and well known developers who have expressed that agentic coding helps them: Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison. This is just randomly off the top of my head, you can find many more. None of them claim that agentic coding does a years' worth of work for them in an hour, of course.

In addition, pretty much every developer I know has used some form of GenAI or agentic coding over the last year, and they all say it gives them some form of speed up, most of them significant. The "AI doesn't help me" crowd is, as far as I can tell, an online-only phenomenon. In real life, everyone has used it to at least some degree and finds it very valuable.

trashb 7 hours ago

Those are some high profile (celebrity) developers.

I wonder if they have measured their results? I believe that the perceived speed up of AI coding is often different from reality. The following paper backs this idea https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 . Can you provide data that objects this view, based on these (celebrity) developers or otherwise?

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  • embedding-shape 6 hours ago

    Almost off-topic, but got me curious: How can I measure this myself? Say I want to put concrete numbers to this, and actually measure, how should I approach it?

    My naive approach would be to just implement it twice, once together with an LLM and once without, but that has obvious flaws, most obvious that the order which you do it with impacts the results too much.

    So how would I actually go about and be able to provide data for this?

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    • disgruntledphd2 2 hours ago

      > My naive approach would be to just implement it twice, once together with an LLM and once without, but that has obvious flaws, most obvious that the order which you do it with impacts the results too much.

      You'd get a set of 10-15 projects, and a set of 10-15 developers. Then each developer would implement the solution with LLM assistance and without such assistance. You'd ensure that half the developers did LLM first, and the others traditional first.

      You'd only be able to detect large statistical effects, but that would be a good start.

      If it's just you then generate a list of potential projects and then flip a coin as to whether or not to use the LLM and record how long it takes along with a bunch of other metrics that make sense to you.

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      • embedding-shape 2 hours ago

        The initial question was:

        > wonder if they have measured their results?

        Which seems to indicate that there would be a suitable way for a single individual to be able to measure this by themselves, which is why I asked.

        What you're talking about is a study and beyond the scope of a single person, and also doesn't give me the information I'd need about myself.

        > If it's just you then generate a list of potential projects and then flip a coin as to whether or not to use the LLM and record how long it takes along with a bunch of other metrics that make sense to you.

        That sounds like I can just go by "yeah, feels like I'm faster", which I thought exactly was parent wanted to avoid...

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Adrig 7 hours ago

A lot of comments reads like a knee jerk reaction to the Twitter crowd claiming they vibe code apps making 1m$ in 2 weeks.

As a designer I'm having a lot of success vibe coding small use cases, like an alternative to lovable to prototype in my design system and share prototypes easily.

All the devs I work with use cursor, one of them (front) told me most of the code is written by AI. In the real world agentic coding is used massively

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margorczynski 8 hours ago

I think it is a mix of ego and fear - basically "I'm too smart to be replaced by a machine" and "what I'm gonna do if I'm replaced?".

The second part is something I think a lot about now after playing around with Claude Code, OpenCode, Antigravity and extrapolating where this is all going.

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  • menaerus 7 hours ago

    I agree it's about the ego .. about the other part I am also trying to project few scenarios in my head.

    Wild guess nr.1: large majority of software jobs will be complemented (mostly replaced) with the AI agents, reducing the need for as many people doing the same job.

    Wild guess nr.2: demand for creating software will increase but the demand for software engineers creating that software will not follow the same multiplier.

    Wild guess nr.3: we will have the smallest teams ever with only few people on board leading perhaps to instantiating the largest amount of companies than ever.

    Wild guess nr.4: in near future, the pool of software engineers as we know them today, will be drastically downsized, and only the ones who can demonstrate they can bring the substantial value over using the AI models will remain relevant.

    Wild guess nr.5: getting the job in software engineering will be harder than ever.

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akoboldfrying 10 hours ago

Nit: s/Reddit/Redis/

Though it is fun to imagine using Reddit as a key-value store :)

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