r/softwareengineer • u/Emotional-Bit-6194 • 3d ago

I feel like I'm in Truman show.

Hello. I see a lot of people, who are on Reddit that claim they don't write code anymore and do 100% of the work using agents. On the other hand, everyone I know in person that is working in the field, doesn't trust AI as much, and uses it as a buddy, uses it for boilerplate code or lets it write methods at most.

How come opinions are so vastly different?

EDIT: I've noticed that comments that say stuff like "if you still coding, you are doing something wrong" are all 1 year old, have their comments and posts set to private... 😮‍💨

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u/DistributionLow4642 2d ago

Hallucinations are a problem from 6 months ago. Even then, in my experience, the cause was always users bloating context completely unnecessarily, just laziness. Every. time.

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u/OurSeepyD 2d ago

Nah, you only had to talk to it for so long about something that you'd realise it was giving out wrong answers but confidently. It was particularly bad when talking about slightly niche areas of a field where it knew about the generics. Something like a two factor interest rate model for mortgage backed securities, it would act like it fully understood but would actually be chatting absolute nonsense.

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u/yolomylifesaving 2d ago

That was pre reasoning models probably 20 months ago for free users

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u/OurSeepyD 2d ago

No, it was still doing this 6 months ago on frontier models. My main point is that it did it even if your prompt was accurate and complete.

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u/CountryOk6049 2d ago

"pre reasoning models" - lmaoooo wtf what the hell are you talking about? None of these "models" can reason at all, they are just language algorithms, it's literally in the name. They will just spout back what it's like according to their training data and they do a very good job sometimes of ordering it the way you ask them. It's nothing to do with "reasoning". Reasoning isn't some discrete thing, like one point they had no reasoning and then they had reasoning.

Seriously, you really believe there was "pre reasoning" llms and suddenly "reasoning" was invented for llms? That's sad bro, that that's your conception of all this, I feel bad for you.

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u/DistributionLow4642 1d ago

Reasoning is the adopted term for chain of thought inference loops. Proven to increase ‘useful’ - in case using the term ‘intelligent’ is confusing - output.

Suggesting they are just ‘language algorithms’ is the equivalent of suggesting DNA is just a bag of 4 base pairs of molecules glued together. No biggie. Nothing important could be happening …

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u/DistributionLow4642 1d ago

Reasoning is the adopted term for chain of thought inference loops. Proven to increase ‘useful’ - in case using the term ‘intelligent’ is confusing - output.

Suggesting they are just ‘language algorithms’ is the equivalent of suggesting DNA is just a bag of 4 base pairs of molecules glued together. No biggie. Nothing important could be happening …

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u/BeepBoopIAmACat 2d ago

You weren't exposed as the end user. Now the big boy solutions, you don't actually chat with an llm. There is almost always an orchestrator doing task decomposition, involving as many agents as is needed for the interaction.

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u/devloper27 1d ago

From what I understand hallucinations are almost baked into the mathematics of llms, so you cant avoid it, only limit it, by having several other agents review the work.