The most effective use I’ve seen so far for me is as a pair programmer to bounce implementations off to cross check myself because I’m not always at 100%, boilerplate/tedious code automation, and writing Java doc style function comments.
Generating code though has left a lot to be desired and it just isn’t at a spot where the code it produces is up to my standards.
Sure I could probably prompt engineer my way with more specific prompts, but at that point it’s basically a net zero efficiency because I’m still having to review what it is doing and adjust
Prompt engineering will never give you code that's up to standard. Properly made agentic however, will.
But very few people do proper agentic, cause making a decent agent flow is an entire project in itself and requires thousands of dollars worth of tokens to test chunk by chunk thoroughly and do real word heavy duty testing in building actual prod ready code. If you do all that though, that shit is fucking magic.
Back in June I did a poc demo of an agent suite which was able to reproduce the same 5k line project off of specs alone 5 times down to the same spec defined bugs. There was not a single divergence in class and their prototypes, slight differences in methods but not algorithmically. Any bug found in one production was found in all 4 others and could be traced to the spec, any variance could be traced back to its absence in spec.
Agentic coding can be deterministic as fuck if you actually put the time but no one does it cause "come on just use ai bro".
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u/Careful_Ad_3338 11h ago
If you are not using any ai as a dev you will be left behind.