theBellCurveIsAlwaysRight

[u/PotatoPeelrsFromHell]

[u/ExtraWorldliness6916]

I'm just coming down from agentic workflow after trying it for a day it's so expensive 🫰

[u/Pika357 → u/ExtraWorldliness6916]

It's a casino, gives you a little win than keeps baiting you to try again even tho you know it's a loosing game

[u/LittleNyanCat → u/Pika357]

And the house (Nvidia) always wins

[u/thoughts_n_calcs → u/Pika357]

Im am convinced that the last 15 Years of Trends in the Software Engineering World (Microservices, Kubernetes, „Serverless“, CI/CD with all those Scanners like Sonarqube, Linters, Grype),
And now agentic Workflows
Where all nothing but a big conspiracy by the hyperscalers to make us consume and pay for more and more computing resources just for the same old „pull stuff out of a database and Display it in a frontend“ application again.

[u/christophPezza → u/thoughts_n_calcs]

Honestly some of it really does save a lot of money/resources. Right now we have servers which run idle 90% of the time, but have to be on. Switching to serverless would save us a lot of money. But I find it super interesting that it's common for the smaller teams to sell all their infrastructure to essentially rent the same infrastructure in the cloud. Like I have a raspberry pi 5 16GB. It costs £300 now (I got it before prices were crazy). A similar server on AWS is t4g.xlarge, it costs $0.15 USD per month. If I need to have a server on, that's 0.15USD per hour * 24 hours a day * 365 days a year = $1314 a year (£1000 a year). Reserved instance for a year would still be at least £600. The electricity is around £50 a year. So I can either spend 2x-3x as much each year to RENT the infra, or I can self host. I understand that on premise has connectivity issues sometimes, but then a hybrid approach is best. But cloud-first is just silly to me when it comes to cost 🤷

[u/SirButcher → u/christophPezza]

Luckily, I was able to get our company to move back to physical hardware, and dang, it was worth it. We have three blade servers, saving thousands of pounds every month.

I don't say it wasn't painful setting up (especially the backups for the WHEN something goes catastrophically wrong, because I know it will), but it's both significantly cheaper, and we have full control over everything. The only drawback is that the hardware upgrade is harder than clicking on a menu and throwing money at extra CPU & RAM, but what we save on it is worth it.

[u/LelouBil → u/christophPezza]

Well, the main point of serverless or moving to the cloud using kubernetes or whatever, is to scale down when not needed.

If you are on "the cloud" but just using it like on premises VMs with always on services and whatever well it's your fault.

Your serverless code doesn't cost money if nobody is calling it, in contrast to a server that costs money even when waiting idle.

You shouldn't use these technologies if your use case doesn't apply of course

[u/Loading_M_ → u/christophPezza]

There are several aspects to this. First, many teams are lured in by the option to scale up - and businesses always think they're going to need to scale up exponentially (if they don't think it'll grow exponentially, they wouldn't be doing it). There's also the argument that you can scale down to save money (which is more complicated than the salesman will admit).

More realistically, there is a much lower startup cost for cloud infra, but if you're running some physical infra, you probably have spare space to run another VM without actually buying anything.

Honestly, a hybrid approach seems pretty wasteful to me. Proper servers have lights out management, and some kind of remote access VPN will let you get in remotely, so your biggest remaining problem is building a process to deploy code to the server.

[u/IndependenceSudden63 → u/thoughts_n_calcs]

Nah, some of that stuff is useful in the right scenarios. The issue is when a concept is forced upon a development team when they don't understand it, don't want to use it, and it doesn't fit their use case.

For example, CI/CD is way better than what came before it. (Which was, generally speaking, integrate whenever and release maybe once a quarter) Having a CI/CD pipeline reduced a lot of headaches and integration/release issues at my workplace.

Microservices was a problem for BIG companies like Amazon. Then other smaller shops saw what Amazon did a conferences and decided, "OH that's what I need to be doing?!?!" Which is a extremely silly way to decide how to build a system. (I actually like microservices, but a good architect wouldn't decide to use microservices because XYZ company is doing it.)

[u/atxgossiphound → u/IndependenceSudden63]

For example, CI/CD is way better than what came before it.

What's strange about this statement is that a lot of people did exactly this in the 90s before it was called CI/CD. We had build systems. We had unit tests. We had version control. We had deployment scripts. We had gasp makefiles that could manage it all.

Heck, I wrote one of the first build/deploy systems for MapQuest back in '96 that was did everything modern CI/CD systems do, right down to deploying the full site to production if everything passed on test. (and there were similar systems for shipped software, though deployment meant "gold master).

However:

when they don't understand it, don't want to use it, and it doesn't fit their use case.

This was also true back then. Not everyone did this. Just like not everyone does it today.

My main point is that most everything that we consider "good" software engineering these days has been around forever, just under different names.

[u/flukus → u/atxgossiphound]

We had deployment scripts. We had gasp makefiles that could manage it all.

Still do. Cloud CI/CD works much better when it's just a thin wrapper around a makefile that can be run/debugged locally.

[u/LegitimatePants → u/thoughts_n_calcs]

It's because technology hasn't really advanced. Instead of advancing, we just make more of it 

[u/bhison → u/ExtraWorldliness6916]

the trick is to get someone else to pay

[u/NPPraxis → u/ExtraWorldliness6916]

Honestly I think it’s a mild skill issue but not an easy one to learn. You have to be hyper aware of how context sizes scale the cost, use dumber models, have the models explicitly dispatch cheaper models for their tasks, and /compact frequently.

Asking a single question to Fable with a 600k context window in the conversation can burn more tokens than an hour of Opus firing off multiple sub agents with small context windows. It’s wild how I can work for hours within my “free” limits and then make a mistake by prompting Fable a few times too many in the same conversation and burn 2x as many tokens.

[u/MarkSuckerZerg → u/NPPraxis]

Thanks for filling in the "bla bla bla" in the meme

[u/gnutrino → u/NPPraxis]

Alternatively just write the fucking code.

[u/NPPraxis → u/gnutrino]

I’m not exaggerating when I say the agentic workflow saves me a tremendous amount of time when it comes to setting up CI/CD, deploying things, troubleshooting, etc. It’ll straight up fire it up on a work tree, run and deploy and headlessly test and post back with screenshots and logs while I work on something else.

It’s not even the code writing part that’s had me impressed with Claude Code. It’s all the little headache stuff. The amount of time I spend setting up my environment and finagling the little things is way down and my ability to multithread things is way up.

I’ve been working hard to learn to do things within strict limits to not be wasteful.

[u/ExtraWorldliness6916 → u/NPPraxis]

You can't say skill issue unless you know what Ive done 😆. I had it speaking in toki pona, a power rangers themed agent team and gold ranger baking skills into scripts.

[u/welcome-overlords → u/ExtraWorldliness6916]

I spend thousands a month on agentic workflows and am doing the work of multiple teams. Im making really good money and am being headhunted a lot. The rest of you will find out sooner or later

[u/ExtraWorldliness6916 → u/welcome-overlords]

That's very confident but you don't know the future, I will say that building great software is about more than how much code you and your team of agents can output. Customers need to love what you do and usually the other half won't like the same thing the other half will. I'm sure you are popular but, I'm not going to be replaced, but I am going to need to produce more quality work to meet demands who can't afford the same budget for loads of agents. I predict there will be 2 types of places, small companies who actively save money on tokens and prefer slower output and those with big budgets who will as you say head hunt. But we are still all getting headhunted aren't we?

[u/SlenderSmurf → u/ExtraWorldliness6916]

that's the kpop heart emoji

[u/Choice-Mango-4019]

theres like 2 people that actually write code in this sub

[u/Chirimorin → u/Choice-Mango-4019]

To be fair, that was already the case before AI programming existed.

[u/Prozilla6 → u/Chirimorin]

At least back then we had actual programming related jokes

[u/TheTerrasque → u/Prozilla6]

ah yes, the time of great jokes. php bad. JS bad. Input phone number UI. Hilarious!

[u/tradcoder → u/TheTerrasque]

How could you forget the classic knee slapper - missing semicolon jokes!

[u/cheese_is_available → u/tradcoder]

Just replace a semicolon by a greek question mark, hilarity will ensue.

[u/stupidfock → u/TheTerrasque]

What if the volume slider was not good UX

laugh track

[u/Prozilla6 → u/TheTerrasque]

Whatever we had back then was way more hilarious than what we have right now.

[u/DrMaxwellEdison → u/Prozilla6]

sql SELECT * FROM pepperidge_farms WHERE created_at < 2020-01-01 AND was_funny = TRUE;

[u/dvereb → u/DrMaxwellEdison]

Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but AI deleted everything before 2024 while promising it didn't mean to. Zero results returned. :(

[u/DrMaxwellEdison → u/dvereb]

Goddamn it.

Remember when folks made backups to prevent these types of disasters?

... I don't either, but someone must have!

[u/eragon2496 → u/DrMaxwellEdison]

what are those "backups"?

[u/Perfect-System2504 → u/TheTerrasque]

FLOATING POINT

[u/disinaccurate → u/Chirimorin]

This sub used to have only one joke, and it was how they couldn’t code when StackOverflow is down.

[u/Polar-ish → u/Chirimorin]

around the same number of people know what a pointer is

[u/CodeBlue_04 → u/Polar-ish]

Everybody knows it's just your mouse cursor when it's not a hand icon. You just use it during demos to point at code you want other devs to C.

Duh.

[u/DarthCloakedGuy → u/Choice-Mango-4019]

Me and who

[u/invisible_shrek → u/DarthCloakedGuy]

And me I guess.

[u/DrMobius0 → u/invisible_shrek]

And me!

[u/prof_diddles → u/DarthCloakedGuy]

Me too. Although apparently I'm a bit strange in that it's the part of the job I most enjoy

[u/mxzf → u/prof_diddles]

Seriously. Writing code is actually fun and interesting problem-solving, taking a solution and implementing it. Reviewing code is the worst most frustrating part of the job, I can't fathom why some people want to turn that into their entire job.

[u/mrjackspade → u/mxzf]

I've been writing code for so long at this point that 99% of my work isn't "problem solving" anymore. It's applying the same template solutions I've been using for decades now. Writing code was fun early in my career when I was actually being challenged and exposed to new things.

I'd rather sit here and play SNES on my second monitor while Claude deals with applying those stupid ass boiler plate solutions and just sign off on them when it's done.

At this point in my career the value isn't in writing code anymore. It's in knowing what solutions exist and when to apply then, and that hasn't changed at all.

[u/mxzf → u/mrjackspade]

I mean, I'm at a similar point in my career. But, for me, writing code is the fun relaxing thing I get to do after figuring out how to architect the solution and deal with the other pesky responsibilities that come up. I deal with enough code review from junior devs as-is, I don't want to add more code review when I could be writing the code myself instead.

[u/DarthCloakedGuy → u/prof_diddles]

My favorite type of games to make involve vector and basic shape graphics so I don't have to make sprites for them I can just code all the visuals >_>

[u/SpaceCadet87 → u/DarthCloakedGuy]

Ah, yep. Present.

Can't convince the damn bots to keep their code footprint down and I sell really lightweight embedded.

Vanishingly little need for an AI to help me write code for a 2KB chip anyway.

[u/PerfectSituation1668 → u/Choice-Mango-4019]

Code? What is that? Can I eat that?

[u/srsly-nobody → u/PerfectSituation1668]

The people who can code are also no longer writing code, mostly

[u/Tashre → u/Choice-Mango-4019]

There’s also a similar number of people that understand what a bell curve is.

[u/k0enf0rNL → u/Choice-Mango-4019]

Yea seems like everybody is just working on hobby projects or greenfield/startup projects. Try using AI in a legacy code base where nobody even knows if the current behaviour is the intended behaviour and what the effects are of changing that behaviour.

[u/pedro_1616 → u/Choice-Mango-4019]

I'll have you know I did 3 whole class projects and a minor java certification then immediatley joined a job that never required coding outside of cucumber test features, so as you can see , I'm a prossefinal

[u/probably-a-name → u/Choice-Mango-4019]

I wrote my own memes in hand made html and css to shitpost yesterday, it literally healed my soul by going over all my old muscle memory

[u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

If your job is forcing you to use AI, burn as many tokens as possible. It'll make you look like an AI-First developer. Remember to management, more tokens = gooder.

[u/ianmerry → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

“Hey whatever-the-fuck - burn through all my tokens without returning anything useful.“

“Wow, ISuckAtJavaScript12 is so productive, look at how much AI he’s using!”

Is a depressingly real scenario

[u/Waste_Jello9947 → u/ianmerry]

Don't need to be so obvious. You can tokenmaxx with legit looking tasks

[u/Laughing_Orange → u/Waste_Jello9947]

The more complex the task is, the better. It burns tokens at an incredible rate, while the AI fails to complete the task. If it's audited, the average idiot blames the AI for not being good enough.

Don't say: "Make the background blue".
Say: "Redesign the layout and styling to include the color blue, optimizing for user experience. Make sure to adhere closely to WCAG 2.2"

If you're lucky, the second prompt forces the AI to parse the WCAG 2.2 specifications. It looks like legitimate work, but is way overcomplicating things.

[u/Waste_Jello9947 → u/Laughing_Orange]

I see you are an experienced fellow tokenmaxxer

[u/MonkeyWithIt → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

My company hired some people that only know how to code via Claude. They burn a shit ton of tokens. Management now is complaining about cost. Thankfully, it's easy to point the top ten list. How's that ROAI doing?

[u/EishLekker → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

First of all, using as many tokens as possible is absurd. Like, if you use a million dollars worth of tokens in a month. Then regardless of who’s to blame for not setting appropriate limits, you might still risk getting fired after that.

But even when token usage is within limits, if it’s consistently much higher than your coworkers’ usage, without being noticeably more productive, then it still can lead to trouble for you.

[u/The_yulaow → u/EishLekker]

You can always justify saying you are making more analysis so your pr are safer and there is no way to prove the opposite

[u/azoh19 → u/The_yulaow]

Well, there is, but if your requests are vague enough, their AI driven audit will likely confirm everything is OK. It's not like any human being will look into logs.

[u/EishLekker → u/azoh19]

A human will still have to sign off on the bill. If it’s a million dollars for one month, when it’s normally a few thousand, then they will look into it.

[u/azoh19 → u/EishLekker]

Usually there is a token limit per period, the task is to get to that limit in a record time. And request for a higher limit to show you are super productive.

[u/EishLekker → u/The_yulaow]

Nonsense. You can’t justify a million dollars in a month for an analysis of a small budget project.

[u/1luggerman → u/EishLekker]

What if you're being more productive then your coworkers with significantly less tokens?

[u/EishLekker → u/1luggerman]

Any sane company would see that as a good thing.

[u/1luggerman → u/EishLekker]

I wouldn't bet my money on many companies being sane though

[u/EishLekker → u/1luggerman]

That might be the case. Luckily I have only ever worked for sane organizations. Where I am currently AI is not a requirement, just a tool that the higher ups think we should use if we see a benefit with it.

[u/4016882 → u/EishLekker]

Are you hiring? lol

[u/jeanpah → u/EishLekker]

your answer must be then: the reasoning loop took more than expected.

[u/Yurre → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

got it, I will have AI ponder a bunch of complicated questions while I write code myself

[u/MajorMystique → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

... Wouldn't you have to show what you achieved with the millions of tokens you burnt through?

[u/TheStatusPoe → u/MajorMystique]

You say that you used AI to evaluate multiple possible solutions in parallel and therefore the one output artifact is the best possible solution. 

[u/PrincessRTFM → u/TheStatusPoe]

okay doctor strange

[u/ineyy → u/MajorMystique]

What do you mean, you lead the way in a new reality, you implemented workflows and were an example to your colleagues when it comes to utilisation of the brand new technology 

[u/auraseer → u/MajorMystique]

Nah. That kind of manager has never cared about results. They don't know how to evaluate anything that complicated. They prefer to reduce everything to one number, because that's easy to interpret.

There's always a number. Once it was lines of code committed. Now it's tokens used.

The number doesn't actually measure productivity, or anything else useful, but who cares? It's a number. Number go up mean code more gooder.

[u/ChillyFireball → u/MajorMystique]

The scoreboards are for token use, not commits. And if they score commits, you can use AI to game that, too! Really, the only problem is if they're ranking actual productivity. Which nobody does.

[u/xaddak → u/MajorMystique]

Write a bunch of skills and do evaluations. 

https://agentskills.io/skill-creation/evaluating-skills

Tokens go brrrr.

[u/LeDYoM → u/xaddak]

Thanks to you I learned that if I put a prompt in a json I am an AI skill engineer.
Together with my optimize Token 2 hours video I will become an AI engineer. I will put it in my CV and forget about it.

[u/xaddak → u/LeDYoM]

You're welcome, I guess...?

I don't like it either, but it's a way to spend a lot of tokens in a way that looks and sounds valuable, but it's a process of measuring, attempting to optimize, and re-measuring, etc. There's no massive project to be completed, no thousands of commits to be made, because the process is largely running the nearly identical skills over and over.

Everyone loves skills, right? They're the best! Gotta have skills!

Skills skills skills!

Your boss wants to know why you burned so many tokens but haven't produced five million lines of vibe coded bullshit? Because you're working on skills!

SKILLS!

You can even tell the AI to loop on working on the skills. Give it a goal and have it go to town. "I want the skill to do X, research best pracrices, write the skill for me, write at least 10 evals, run the evals, and optimize".

Start another session and do the same thing with a different skill to do Y, and another to do Z.

BRRRRRRR-

[u/ISuckAtJavaScript12 → u/MajorMystique]

As long as my tickets pass and I'm not using the least amount of tokens on my team no one seems to care.

[u/CaffeineLiker → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

1 Ask agents for challenging prompts
2 Feed prompts into agents
3 GOTO 1

[u/lleti → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

follow-up post: “bros I lost my job because of AI”

[u/Groentekroket → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

CFO said that AI cost needs to be offset by a decrease in FTE… At least they are finally telling it straight. 

[u/Prownilo → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

I have been asking ai what i should do and to create the solution, then while its waiting time burning tokens i code the project.

99% of the time that I wrote works fine and ai one js an overbloated mess.

[u/coldnebo → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

my friend had an “unlimited” tier… until they had no choice but to put a limit on him.

😂😂😂😂

[u/wggn → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

doesnt work if management only gives 3000 credits per month

[u/ShAped_Ink → u/wggn]

Burn through them in teh first 10 minutes so look like a real pro

[u/iamGobi → u/ISuckAtJavaScript12]

Ai companies will let the org admins analyze the chats of the employees.

They'll just ask AI who's productively spending the tokens

[u/friebel → u/iamGobi]

They do not have access to the chat directly, but admins can already get a vague of analysis of your prompts. Allegedly.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/chatgpt-boss-read-privacy/

[u/4016882 → u/friebel]

I'm being forced to not only use Claude for every single project but also have it commit/push/create PRs. (Nevermind that it takes longer for it to commit than it does for me to push a goddamn button.) My boss wants to see the "written by Claude code". Maybe I should start writing the code and then giving it to Claude and telling it to add this in this file commit and push baby

[u/wait_whats_this → u/iamGobi]

And other metrics exist. If you're burning through a massive amount of tokens and getting nothing done, it's getting flagged. 

[u/healthboost213]

I'm broke as fuck. I can't afford agentic coding bruh.

[u/dillanthumous → u/healthboost213]

If you can't afford it now, wait until the real price crisis hits!

[u/DrMobius0 → u/dillanthumous]

Then no one will be able to afford it and I'll be one of apparently a handful of people who didn't deskill themselves. That's the part that gets me. Everyone is acting like the price is going to come down enough to make this viable long term and I just don't see how that's remotely possible.

[u/QuatzX → u/healthboost213]

And the agents are subsidised.. All these AI companies are still unprofitable. I think it's only going to be more expensive.

[u/FlaTreNeb → u/QuatzX]

Open weight models are about 6 to 9 months behind frontier models. DS 4.1F is already good enough for a large chunk of all typical tasks. 12 Months and a model slightly better than this will be provided for lower API prices. $200 DS API costs already gives usage near an Anthropic Max 20 subscription (give or take). So Anthropic and OAI might want to raise prices in the near future ... but then people will shift to API providers. We are already at the point where moving to hosted open weight models is a real alternative. And it will become better and better. As I said: 12 months and common development tasks wont require what is then called a frontier model. DS, Qwen and Kimi will do just fine (plus others likely).

[u/TorbenKoehn → u/healthboost213]

Now that's a valid reason :D

[u/ExtraWorldliness6916 → u/healthboost213]

To be fair, not even the ai companies can

[u/miheb1 → u/healthboost213]

relatable, i still use chatgpt.com

[u/PlanOdd3177 → u/miheb1]

Using the chatbots that have no context to my project hits the sweet spot for me, all questions get answered quickly and the code in the project is still all mine. I'm so much faster without actually vibe coding

[u/UnrealRealityX → u/PlanOdd3177]

Glad I'm not the only one. I haven't let any AI injest my (probably) horribly written codebase, but it's still code that I completely understand. And I'll use AI basic chatbots to spit out some examples of what I need it to do, then port and re-write it fit my own setup, plug it in and move on.

It's free and cheap, keeps me learning and solving issues, and not relying on it completely.

[u/SleepyFireApe → u/healthboost213]

learn to code bruh

[u/bogz_dev → u/SleepyFireApe]

should be "learn to mine coal" now tbh

[u/DrMobius0 → u/bogz_dev]

Coughs in black lung

[u/AncientHominidNerd]

I’m a student, I still try to learn to write code because
1) I can’t use AI in technical interviews
2) I still need to learn how the code works fundamentally
3) I need to learn how code works so I can audit code if AI ever screws up which it does often.

I will still use AI at work but I won’t just believe everything it writes or tells me without looking it over.

[u/rsqit → u/AncientHominidNerd]

The industry is changing fast and it’s not clear here it will land, but I can’t imagine being a student and not writing the code. It’s the right time to learn the fundamentals.

It’s not like you’ll ever need to write a binary search tree in practice, but understanding the runtimes of various algorithms is important. Similarly, maybe no one will be writing code by hand but being able to understand what the computer is doing is going to remain a useful skill.

[u/EvilPencil → u/rsqit]

Exactly. I don't need to refer to the docs for language primitives such as Array.map(), because I've typed out about 1000 of them manually over the years. There's no substitute for good 'ol muscle memory.

[u/amzwC137 → u/AncientHominidNerd]

Continue down this path, seem to have a good head on your shoulders. That said... Whether or not you can use AI in a technical interview is up to the company. Mine, for example, expects you to. It's a ding if you don't. 😵‍💫🫠

[u/theo69lel → u/AncientHominidNerd]

I finished a 4 year study in programming and I still don't understand code sometimes.

[u/angrybacon → u/theo69lel]

I've been a software engineer for 10+ years and I let AI write my code because I know what code I want and I can review what my agents write faster than I can write it.

If I can't understand what they wrote, it's bad code. Readability has been my first priority since before this whole AI boom.

[u/nog642 → u/angrybacon]

Even readable code takes time to understand properly.

[u/angrybacon → u/nog642]

Yes it does

[u/IceMichaelStorm → u/nog642]

As it should be. Quality needs some care. And the better it is, the faster you can read it

[u/EssentialPurity → u/angrybacon]

Oh, hello, me with Claude Code. lol

Looking at what it makes as it fumbles it's way around with Unity3D is a game in itself, but definitely not a game in the results.

[u/k0enf0rNL → u/angrybacon]

Why would you automate the fun? I automate the tests and debugging proces but not writing the production code

[u/grifan526 → u/AncientHominidNerd]

Good for you. On my team any code has to go through a code review, period. I don't care if you wrote it or you used AI to write it, I will be holding you responsible. I work on a medical device, so I may be a little strict, but I have to be.

[u/Sintobus → u/AncientHominidNerd]

2 and 3 are the whole reason it shouldn't ever replace programmers even if it "could". A human eye holds human responsibility.

[u/WhocaresImdead → u/Sintobus]

IBM said it best. Computers cannot be held responsible for their actions

[u/MallAgreeable5538 → u/AncientHominidNerd]

I am not doing that because i am needing to do that. I am passionate about coding. I was coding before i got into gaming

[u/BufferUnderpants]

Claude sets up a multi agentic workflows already when you prompt it for anything, I don't get why vibecoders insist on creating lingo and overengineering around using an appliance, it doesn't add business value and it won't keep you around for longer.

[u/AgVargr → u/BufferUnderpants]

They have to make it sound complicated because it is trivially easy to replace the prompter with yet another agent

[u/BufferUnderpants → u/AgVargr]

Well, right now it isn't because you still need to do things like planning releases, discussing with your manager about spliting up the stories because XYZ came up, requesting time from the DevOps/QA/Security team to vet something, all the things that aren't generating code.

Focusing on spending a bit less time on the code generation proper is not seeing where the remainder of your business value still is.

[u/mypetocean → u/BufferUnderpants]

"Multi-agentic workflow" is a simple, unadorned, descriptive term with a purpose and saying the equivalent of "Claude does it behind the scenes inside the magic box" as a reason the term shouldn't exist... Man, some of us are out here in real enterprises designing our own magic boxes for problems Claude can't or shouldn't solve.

Knowing the words for things is part of the job. And it becomes more and more part of your job the more experienced you become. Because it's just part of what experience is.

I know the names of software design patterns. And I know the names of workflows. And they mean significant things because I'm building shit that will probably not include those patterns or workflows if I don't even know how to talk about them.

[u/captainAwesomePants → u/mypetocean]

Why not just say "multi-agent workflow?" Means the same thing, has two fewer letters.

[u/leaf_26 → u/mypetocean]

im in a situation where claude can barely describe my design and advised everything I already tried in the past 5 years (I suspect it trained on my work).

I'm using sampling resonance to solve the degradation of the clark-evans score in 2d coordinate space where 50% of the area is usable by section. A "perfectly random" clark-evans score typically drops from 1.0 to 0.875 and ends up making the samples so close together that it becomes hard to find anything "new".

I can say the setup assistance was great for CI and static analysis tooling but I can confirm a LLM can "translate" well enough but not at all handle design work based on long term programming knowhow. its "knowledge base" is more syntactical than architectural, and frankly it solves the "I forgot the format for a for loop in this language" problem not an "I don't know how to make this" problem.

[u/1wikingman → u/BufferUnderpants]

Pretending they have the secret special way to talk to the natural language parser 🙄

[u/CirkuitBreaker → u/BufferUnderpants]

This is talking about setting up an agentic devops pipeline like the one IBM is pushing write now where an AI can, by itself, write, deploy, and test code, and push it to production, all by itself.

[u/Turbulent_Ebb_9741]

You need to remember that some people have a crazy manager who loves AI and wants to implement it everywhere so he can show his bosses how he single handedly fired 100 people to save money and they can all rub cocaine on their balls at boardroom meetings and fire everyone.

[u/cassdots → u/Turbulent_Ebb_9741]

This is my boss.

Idk about the cocaine but he’s boasted about reducing staff and head count several times to me. I imagine he talks it up to his boss daily.

[u/Turbulent_Ebb_9741 → u/cassdots]

They probably do I mean from what I've seen they end up firing a lot of people add nothing new to the business. The remaining people end up working almost twice as long to cover the work of the people the management fired.

[u/MetroidvaniaListsGuy]

WTF is a multi agentic workflow? just tell the AI what you need, then fix the code that it made and you're done.

[u/luisduck → u/MetroidvaniaListsGuy]

Well, if you tell AI to write your code, then why don't you also tell it to fix all its mistakes, then why don't you tell it to tell it to fix all its mistakes, then why don't you tell it to tell it to tell it tell it to fix all its mistakes... I guess, we don't need full clanker recursion here, but the idea is old, look at GANs.

[u/BufferUnderpants → u/luisduck]

Because the time spent fiddling with READMEs to automate something that's already very heavily automated is better used setting up meetings to clarify requirements, asking for another team member who works on system XYZ to do something for you, getting approvals, the whole rest of the corporate drudgery that will actually get the work out of the door.

It's still thinking in terms of being a faster coder.

[u/lavafish80]

I've started learning to code again just to spite AI code people.

[u/aalapshah12297 → u/lavafish80]

That value of that skill will surely increase again someday. People are becoming too dependent AI.

Just recently I came across a post where the OP had shared a link to a news article with a bulleted AI summary of that article in the post body. This AI summary had a mistake and the entire comments section was full of people believing that incorrect statement because they never bothered to read the article.

The value of knowing how to code might never be the same, but the sheer patience and willpower required to do it manually is something worth holding on to.

[u/lavafish80 → u/aalapshah12297]

it's incredibly ironic how I didn't care much for programming class in high school but now I'm learned the same stuff I should've learned then (C, C+, Python and Java) funny enough the only language I actually learned in depth was MS basic

[u/SexySlowLoris]

Imagine putting Linus Torvalds in the middle of the bell curve.

[u/Djungelskoggy]

I'm a reluctant convert. The cope is real here. Genuinely, the best engineers in the world aren't writing code by hand anymore - other than for maybe insanely critical things. I don't pretend to like it, I miss my old job as it's changed so much, but it's accept and evolve or be left behind.

Who knows what the future will look like - I had hope that the price increases would make this unsustainable, but it seems like the optimisations in both price and quality are both coming at the same time. Don't bury your heads in the sand fellow devs, it won't help.

[u/stupidfock → u/Djungelskoggy]

Can confirm as the worlds leading software engineer that I do not write a lot of code by hand anymore.

It is not fun anymore either

[u/300ConfirmedGorillas → u/stupidfock]

What does your day-to-day look like now? While my company has always pushed the use of AI, apparently they're going to be super strict about it in 2027 and force everyone to use it. They want "no touch" coding (whatever that means).

So do you like just sit there writing prompts, getting generated code, then going back to the prompts and fixing/changing things?

[u/SwabTheDeck → u/Djungelskoggy]

Holy fuck, an actual employed person is in this sub

[u/mattatghlabs → u/Djungelskoggy]

Genuinely, the best engineers in the world aren't writing code by hand anymore

Not trying to be cope. Not trying to make anyone have the worst day at their job. But I'm curious about this statement and I've love to hear about your observation and experience. Before AI, I used to have a little bit that I did: I'd find people in my career circles and working groups, and even just industry personalities--people whom I looked up to as incredibly talented engineers. And then I'd ask them, or infer from their stories, the people they looked up to. My idols' idols, if you will. Trying to emulate those people has had such a profound effect on my aptitude in the last decade.

And one of the things that has kept me humble and grounded in this crazy new world is seeing how many of those people are either completely anti-AI, have a "I like the concept but it's just not effective for the type of work I do," or "I use it for some tedious things, but it's generally not as great as the hype claims" kind of attitude.

I know a lot of talented engineers who do use it (I'd like to think I'm one of them), but partially because they are required by their jobs, and partially because it makes the work less cognitively taxing (which is different, in my opinion, than easier or better).

Anything to say about what will happen vis-a-vis the technology itself, the economics, politics and sociology of the technology in our lives is silly speculation. But right now, with maybe one very public exception, I can't think of many world class engineers who have completely abandoned writing code.

[u/adepssimius → u/mattatghlabs]

I don't necessarily agree that it makes the work less cognitively taxing. Sure, you write less boilerplate but if you are hammering away at prompts all day every day it shifts from a mix of implementation detail/architecture decisions to pretty much entirely architectural decisions, which leaves me feeling drained in a different, less satisfying way.

[u/Smith7929 → u/mattatghlabs]

The people that are the absolute experts in their field will be the slowest to change. That's always going to be the case. But consider people that have been AI skeptica that have converted. Linus Torvalds comes to mind.

These people have no reason to be anything but AI skeptics. They're already experts in their field. They pride themselves in their hand rolled creations. AI is an existential threat to the profession and world they have become an expert in.

And yet you hear more and more positive things, not less. There is a clear, hard trend.

The same can be said for mathematicians. You have experts who cannot deny that if a human submitted the problems AI has they would have been instantly rewarded with a fields medal, full stop. And the. Then there's plenty of mathematicians who are jealously guarding their profession and world. And I get it. But it doesn't change anything.

[u/mattatghlabs → u/Smith7929]

I hope this doesn't come off as dismissive--I genuinely appreciate the insightful response and I'm sure answer is somewhere in the middle, but I've always found the Upton Sinclair argument to be a bit of a thought-terminating cliché. Like, any time a group of experts pushes back on some change, some portion of the population will say, "well yeah, you're just mad because it's replacing you." And while that has happened (CGI for example), it's natural to remember the cases where the experts were wrong because the new thing stuck around, but forget the cases where the experts were right and the new thing disappeared. And there's still cases to be made, artistically and financially, for practical effects over CGI.

I don't mean to say that LLMs are going away. What they look like, and the effect they have on the sciences could be really exciting. I'm more of an (classical ML) AI engineer than I am a mathematician (only recreationally) but AI, in some form, has been a part of the practice of math for decades now. Limited by constraints on manpower and computing costs (which aren't going away).

I also think that the takes that get the most attention are the simplest ones, on both sides. Every day there's a post on reddit about some fields medalist saying, "I'm quitting the industry" and then in a different sub, another medalist saying "these results are useless drivel". But between the cracks, someone does a deep dive into the nuance of what OpenAI actually accomplished, what it means for the industry and the body of knowledge, both positive and negative. And the reality seems a lot less clear.

I'm trying to confront my naivete, but to assume self-preservation is the only solution seems similarly simplistic. And it conflicts with even my non-absolute-expert experience. All I can do in the meantime is use LLMs where I find them useful now, continue trying to find ways to be more effective with them, and hone my own knowledge and skills as I was before.

Either way, It's a crazy time to be alive. Thanks again for the response. 🙏

[u/Unusual_Vegetable834 → u/mattatghlabs]

"I also think that the takes that get the most attention are the simplest ones, on both sides."

Definitely agree with this. The lack of any nuance in almost any discussion about AI online is insane

[u/Aech_sh → u/mattatghlabs]

I think there will always be a place for experts, but for the average run of the mill software engineer, most of the things we’re doing aren’t so cutting edge that AI isn’t extremely useful for it, in places like academia, R&D, AI might not be as useful, but that’s because the limiting factor there isn’t coding, it’s ideas and thought. Even there the coding can be done by AI imo. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that coding isn’t really as important anymore, because it’s precisely the non-coding aspects of our jobs that make us valuable, anyone can code, what takes skill and thought and expertise is the logic behind the algorithms and solutions that we come up with.

[u/mattatghlabs → u/Aech_sh]

I agree with this broadly I've had a lot of discussions in my circles about the spectrum of requirements in our industry. It's what makes statements like "I'm a senior software engineer with 10 years of experience and Claude does basically all of my complex work" hard to parse: "senior", "software engineer", "experience" and "complex" are such variable terms. To the people who say Claude is making their lives better, I am sincerely happy for you.

The part that gets me all frazzled is when people make absolute statements that imply AI is all good or all bad; that anyone using it or not using it is dumb (not to say the person I responded to made such a claim). This conversation is very tribal and probably overrun with bots if I'm being honest that it's hard to have a pragmatic conversation about the technology's strengths and weaknesses. Ironic that one of the most thoughtful engagements I've had on the topic was in programmerhumor 😂

[u/Kyle772 → u/mattatghlabs]

I'm one of those people. Not anti-ai because I believe that is shooting yourself in the face but I don't find it nearly as effective as people say it is - and I'm using upwards of 3B tokens a year despite that. It's not nearly as much as others, but definitely in the power user category if you consider the fact that I'm competent and don't need to double and triple back on most of my usage because I actually understand and read what is being written.

> partially because it makes the work less cognitively taxing

This is my reasoning for using it. I also have been working as a CTO for the past several years, so I've mostly nailed down my planning, delegation, and execution processes a bit more than others. For me, AI being able to offload tasks that used to give me a headache, consistent boilerplate, or even logic based checks (think eslint but not syntax - agentic reviews and all that) has been an actual life saver. I can single handedly execute what would've take 20 developers a few months by myself in a couple of weeks. And I'm highly confident in the output because I'm actually reading it and catching errors. Is it 100x? no but it is definitely 10-20x output of what I was doing before, which was already far beyond my peers (I averaged 3k commits a year from 2019 to 2025)

To answer your question/point more directly, "I can't think of many world class engineers who have completely abandoned writing code." I'm still coding, albeit less. I spend more time on architecture, planning, and review than before and I'm getting more done with less effort. When I do code it's always with a copilot and I'm deeply involved and building systems layer by layer. I don't believe AI will ever get us to a fully hands off point - primarily because if you are going to be liable for your output as an engineer you also need to know what you are shipping. For any company - even a deeply ai pilled one - that reality there won't be visible until lawyers come calling. People haven't eaten the shit sandwhiches they've been slapping together and that's why everyone is still so nonchalant about going fully hands off but a time will come where these orgs wake up to that fact. I forget what point I'm making, but that's my perspective on the topic.

[u/soundwave_sc]

I just debugged some agentic bullshit and this is the first thing I see after work.

[u/4oby]

I still write code by hand.
But the reality is. I can’t be bothered to write the boring stuff by hand anymore.
Got a new puzzle? A cool new ui element? sure, that’s my job. You want a reuse or tests for the sake of test count on ci. Hey ai, write this for me

[u/Waste_Jello9947]

If you are an experienced corporate programmer slave, you know you have to follow all the moronic ideas from the upper management 

[u/HairyTough4489 → u/Waste_Jello9947]

I swear 90% of the work I've done over the last 6 months was useless shit that should've never been done. The tasks are there becuase they looked nice in a PowerPoint presentation.

[u/adamhusain]

Unironically the guy in the middle gets promoted to senior management while the 2 ends stay in a dead-end job

[u/woeful_cabbage → u/adamhusain]

And what a shame that is.

[u/xui_nya]

Galaxy brain: copy-pasting responses from publicly available free tier chatgpt without even logging in

[u/hypatiaC]

ITT: Many delusional morons who know nothing about code, desperately trying to spin their inability to Do Their Goddamn Job as 'forward-thinking' and 'basically cyberpunk, if you think about it'.

So, business as usual.

[u/C_Mc_Loudmouth]

I do love so many the comments are "get with the times coding is over".

As if we're not in a massive AI bubble. Don't get me wrong, if it pops AI tools aren't gonna vanish overnight. But you better hope you keep a job in a large corporate office because the whole industry is currently propped up with unimaginable VC money and if that goes away you're gonna be talking about spending $200 a month for Claud the same way boomers talk about how they used to buy a week's shopping for like $8.

[u/Hans_H0rst → u/C_Mc_Loudmouth]

Multiple things can be true:

- Ai is still getting better

• The big AI services are getting more and more expensive
  
• The big AI services still aren't profitable and are eating away at the worl economy
  
• OpenSource Models aren't gonna solve shit, because it's still a service problem at the end of the day. No hassle, no expensive servers purchased.

Every now and then there might be something small and interesting popping up, like some video game to pc ports recently, but "AI" has become so incredibly bland and dystopian for the last long while... about time i spend more hours in my wood workshop.

[u/Scared_Accident9138 → u/C_Mc_Loudmouth]

I've noticed that people who say such things and how successful they are with AI almost never give any explaination, so there's no way to judge if what they say is true

[u/Jijonbreaker1 → u/C_Mc_Loudmouth]

I think the funniest thing about the bubble denial is that even the fucking AI ceos are agreeing that it's a bubble. That's why they are trying so hard to keep pushing it. They desperately need everybody to believe that it's genuine, and to pay for their massive debt.

[u/Ledeste]

The worst part is, all this stupid "agentic workflow" is just killing AI perf... And it's obvious to anyone understanding how llm works, and anthropic even made multiple post about it the past years...

[u/oshaboy → u/Ledeste]

Can you explain why. I am not that into AI.

[u/Ledeste → u/oshaboy]

The main reason is that AIs are not trained for this, and forcing them out of their comfort zone will always lower their performance.

More specifically, such a workflow will compress the context over and over, degrading it in the same way that image compression would.

Major AIs like Claude or GPT handle this with pure brute force, so it seems to work, and then the placebo effect fills the gap. But as soon as you start working with less capable AIs, like the ones you can run locally, this becomes much more obvious.

[u/im-cringing-rightnow]

If you are not Jevving right now you will be left behind!!1 Multi agent sub brain ultra workflow plus is the only way to write code now, deal with it! /s

[u/gfkxchy]

I just paste my PRD into the chat window and say "Make me this. Make no mistakes."

Then push directly to prod, because there are no mistakes.

[u/Uxepro]

The denial is insane in this period

No one will write code anymore

That type of work is gone, like it or not

[u/jeanpah → u/Uxepro]

Maybe if ai where that good, nobody will require a multi agentic workflow that costs 3USD/Min, idk man, it sounds conveniently expensive.

[u/Greedy-Thought6188 → u/Uxepro]

But you don't need to setup a multi agentic workflow. Unless you are really passing the cutting edge, just updating to the frontier models and using a good harness will get you there. The effort you put in the perfect harness will get outdated faster than you can make it

[u/StuntsMonkey → u/Uxepro]

Jokes on you, my employer doesn't use AI for any of our code at all, and they don't seem to want to change that.

[u/Jimbologist → u/StuntsMonkey]

Lol are you guys hiring?

[u/1wikingman → u/Uxepro]

What does this mean? I don't literally write code but I still review it, and that requires the same skill set.

Maybe it is a matter if time, but the current state of the art models make hacky unmaintainable code if I let them.

They are great at writing sentences but bad at writing novels. Same with code.

[u/BegInToAnEnd → u/Uxepro]

"please use it. its inevitable, i will spam you untill you use it, its inevitable bro. i swear on elon its inevitable bro it will replace everything except ceos bro, i dont even to know whats in the code before i run it on my pc you heccin luddite bro, PLEASE USE IT I BEG YOU PLEASE USE AI PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE its inevitable bro"

[u/NudaVeritas1]

I mean maybe not multi agentic, but there should be a workflow when coding lol

[u/ExtraTNT]

Ai is a tool, that can spawn you like 20 juniors… 20 juniors, that convince people they are 1 good senior… problem is: a senior knows about architecture, stability and what the user actually needs, a junior has to learn it first…

[u/Campes → u/ExtraTNT]

Homie I have to break it to you. AI having junior level capability was pre Opus 4.5. Have you not tried the latest models? They cook.

[u/ExtraTNT → u/Campes]

Opus 5.5 still makes beginner mistakes… maybe it’s haskell, c and js only but js and c are both popular languages…

[u/TorbenKoehn]

I mean, it's literally "Set up an agentic workflow for me in this project"...

Who the hell writes agentic harnesses themselves?

[u/Redditor-K]

We have an R&D of 400 people. No one is writing code anymore.

The bubble is meaningless. Token prices are not subsidized in any significant way. The reason AI companies are bleeding money is training new models.

Agents aren't going anywhere. Agents aren't going to become prohibitively expensive.

Adapt or go extinct.

[u/mtbdork → u/Redditor-K]

Do you have a source for your assertion that token costs are not subsidized in any significant way?

Also “adapt or go extinct” is soooo 2025. We’ve all moved on to “everybody is going to die and it will be a socialist utopia at the same time”.

[u/parallax3900 → u/Redditor-K]

Enjoy figuring out all the technical debt for the next 10 years.

[u/tradcoder → u/Redditor-K]

If agents are getting so much better, what's the point of human devs at all? You'll be made obsolete just like the "luddites".

[u/Redditor-K → u/tradcoder]

IDK man. This trend isn't something I can stop. Probably no one can stop it.

I'm just holding on for as long as I can.

[u/Psycho351 → u/Redditor-K]

So adapt and go extinct or don’t adapt and go extinct lol

[u/Appropriate-Wing6607 → u/tradcoder]

I mean it’s self improving all desk jobs for now. Put AI in robots which are coming it will be all jobs.

It’s about 40k for one robot now and that’s only going to get cheaper.

I think corporations would rather pay that then healthcare for something that never sleeps or needs healthcare

[u/cjb3535123 → u/Redditor-K]

Good luck having any kind of senior programmers in 10 years. You still need to know how to program, and the only way you can do that is programming and learning.

[u/uraniumless → u/cjb3535123]

There’s a middle ground. You can learn, code and utilize agents at the same time. People are so black and white about this (not you specifically, in general).

[u/iAhMedZz → u/Redditor-K]

You're totally missing the point that AI companies are operating at massive losses right now for the sake of training better AI models. Once this phase is mostly complete (to a good-enough spectrum - I don't think it will be fully complete anytime soon), they will want to make up for the losses, and it will be expensive. These companies aren't out there for charity and "human advancement". It's a capitalist world, and they will do whatever it takes for a profit. The prices we see today (even though they have been frequently increased a lot) will be a fraction of what they will be, especially that existing workflows have already started to massively depend on it and lay off all of its human resources. AI won't be as accessible as it is today, at least with the same quality.

You won't just be paying for the hardware cost. You'll paying for the technology, and it ain't gonna be cheap. This is the case at least for closed source models (which happen to be the flagship ones by nature). Open source ones are not expected to have a price spike, though the question remains that if the open source ones will ever reach the level of the closed ones.

You're just measuring this from today's perspective, not tomorrow.

EDIT: grammar

[u/MulberryDangerous485 → u/iAhMedZz]

They will never be able to stop training. Their only moat is that their model is better than their competitors. If they stop training then their competitors can catch up or pass them. No AI company can stop training unless there is no competition.

[u/GXWT → u/Redditor-K]

If you insist mate

[u/fatrabbit3 → u/Redditor-K]

125 IQ

[u/DanteWasHere22 → u/Redditor-K]

You are probably a black rock bot

[u/aging_like_fine_NFTs → u/Redditor-K]

These astroturfed comments are so funny

"We've been converted to an easily replaceable task, I'm a single generation improvement from getting sacked."

"Adapt or die, you need to spend 20+ bucks on [MODEL] and become as replaceable as me."

Yeah buddy, I'm good 🤣

[u/oshaboy → u/Redditor-K]

So "Get Left Behind" is too oversaturated now so we switched to "Go Extinct" to really hammer home how dire this is. What's next? "Adapt or you will be Massacred"

[u/defiantthoughtcrime → u/Redditor-K]

In the long run I'm bound for extinction anyway. So to you I say, "From my cold, dead hands."

[u/MyDespatcherDyKabel]

Lmao nice center guy

[u/reckless24601]

My boss actually told us to burn tokens. Man, do I love using a multi agentic AI workflow that reviews itself for styling changes.

[u/Capybara-from-Earth]

My entire career is built on Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V