- 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.
I'm 100% certain most if not all of them are, there is simply too much money flying around and I've seen things that marketing does in the past for way less hyped products. Though in this specific case I think the writer may simply be shilling AI to create demand for their service. Pay us monthly to one click deploy your broken incomplete AI slop. The app doesn't work? No problem just keep prompting harder and paying us more to host/build/test/deploy it...
I've also tried the agent thing and still am with only moderate success. Cursor, Claud-squad, goose, dagger AI agents. In other words all the new hotness, all with various features claiming to solve the fact that agents don't work. Guess what? they still don't.
But hey this is HN? most of the posters are tech fearing luddies right? All the contention on here must mean our grindset is wrong and we are not prompting hard enough.
There is even one shill Ghuntly that claims you need to be "redlining" ai at the cost of $500-$1000 per day to get the full benefits. LOL if that is not a veiled advertisement I don't know what is.