zlacker

[return to "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"]
1. mlsu+ur[view] [source] 2025-06-03 00:07:17
>>tablet+(OP)
I tried the agent thing on:

- Large C codebase (new feature and bugfix)

- Small rust codebase (new feature)

- Brand new greenfield frontend for an in-spec and documented openAPI API

- Small fixes to an existing frontend

It failed _dramatically_ in all cases. Maybe I'm using this thing wrong but it is devin-level fail. Gets diffs wrong. Passes phantom arguments to tools. Screws up basic features. Pulls in hundreds of line changes on unrelated files to refactor. Refactors again and again, over itself, partially, so that the uncompleted boneyard of an old refactor sits in the codebase like a skeleton (those tokens are also sent up to the model).

It genuinely makes an insane, horrible, spaghetti MESS of the codebase. Any codebase. I expected it to be good at svelte and solidJS since those are popular javascript frameworks with lots of training data. Nope, it's bad. This was a few days ago, Claude 4. Seriously, seriously people what am I missing here with this agents thing. They are such gluttonous eaters of tokens that I'm beginning to think these agent posts are paid advertising.

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2. vitafl+6u[view] [source] 2025-06-03 00:29:48
>>mlsu+ur
It’s entirely possible that the people talking up agents also produced spaghetti code but don’t care because they are so much more “productive”.

An interesting thing about many of these types of posts is they never actually detail the tools they use and how they use them to achieve their results. It shouldn’t even be that hard for them to do, they could just have their agent do it for them.

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3. lumost+3x[view] [source] 2025-06-03 00:57:54
>>vitafl+6u
The agent/model being used makes a huge difference. Cline with Claude 3.7 is ridiculously expensive but useful. Copilot is vaguely ok.
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4. galang+ry[view] [source] 2025-06-03 01:10:13
>>lumost+3x
Even just doing the cut and paste thing for one shots, claude sonnet 4 writes good rust code, generally on the first try.
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