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Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent

(allenpike.com)
152 points GavinAnderegg | 1 comments | 01 Jul 25 12:26 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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nickjj ◴[03 Jul 25 17:12 UTC] No.44457178[source]▶
Serious question, how do you justify paying for any of this without feeling like it's a waste?

I occasionally use ChatGPT (free version without logging in) and the amount of times it's really wrong is very high. Often times it takes a lot of prompting and feeding it information from third party sources for it to realize it has incorrect information and then it corrects itself.

All of these prompts would be using money on a paid plan right?

I also used Cursor (free trial on their paid plan) for a bit and I didn't find much of a difference. I would say whatever back-end it was using was possibly worse. The code it wrote was busted and over engineered.

I want to like AI and in some cases it helps gain insight on something but I feel like literally 90% of my time is it prodiving me information that straight up doesn't work and eventually it might work but to get there is a lot of time and effort.

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chis ◴[03 Jul 25 17:17 UTC] No.44457223[source]▶
I can't believe people are still writing comments like this lol how can it be
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zzzeek ◴[03 Jul 25 17:26 UTC] No.44457312[source]▶
I think it's a serious question because something really big is being missed here. There seem to be very different types of developers out there and/or working on very different kinds of codebases. Hypothetically, maybe you have devs or specific contexts where the dev can just write the code really fast where having to explain it to a bot is more time consuming, vs. devs /contexts where lots of googling and guessing goes on and it's easier to get the AI to just show you how to do it.

I'm actually employer mandated to continue to try/use AI bots / agents to help with coding tasks. I'm sort of getting them to help me but I'm still really not being blown away and still tending to prefer not to bother with them with things I'm frequently iterating on, they are more useful when I have to learn some totally new platform/API. Why is that? do we think there's something wrong with me?

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1. vineyardmike ◴[03 Jul 25 17:45 UTC] No.44457482[source]▶
> I'm actually employer mandated to continue to try/use AI bots / agents to help with coding tasks

I think a lot of this comes down to the context management. I've found that these tools work worse at my current employer than my prior one. And I think the reason is context - my prior employer was a startup, where we relied on open source libraries and the code was smaller, following public best practices regarding code structure in Golang and python. My current employer is much bigger, with a massive monorepo of custom written/forked libraries.

The agents are trained on lots of open source code, so popular programming languages/libraries tend to be really well represented, while big internal libraries are a struggle. Similarly smaller repositories tend to work better than bigger ones, because there is less searching to figure out where something is implemented. I've been trying some coding agents with my current job, and they spend a lot more time searching through libraries looking to understand how to implement or use something if it relies on an internal library.

I think a lot of these struggles and differences are also present with people, but we tend to discount this struggle because people are generally good at reasoning. Of course, we also learn from each task, so we improve over time, unlike a static model.