Ask HN: Is anybody producing good code with coding agents?

This is a genuine problem that I hear from senior engineers. I'm looking for a solution. -- The quality of ai-generated code is (claude, agy, copilot, codex a little better). It's exhausting to read. I used to love…

17 points•ruffrey•about 11 hours ago•27 comments•

#code #coding #agents #anybody #producing #x27 #anybody producing #producing good

This is a genuine problem that I hear from senior engineers. I'm looking for a solution.

The quality of ai-generated code is <censored> (claude, agy, copilot, codex a little better).

It's exhausting to read.

I used to love learning from my experienced colleagues and taking pride in what we made. We spent time on elegance and craftsmanship.

Now I spend nearly the whole workday slogging through convoluted code riddled with footguns. I ride on hopes and dreams I might understand a changeset.

It takes 5x longer to review Claude merge requests and I barely understand what I approve.

Each day I drift further from understanding as I shovel the same <censored> into the codebase.

The solution seems to be, reach "level 4 autonomy" and don't read or write code anymore.

WHO HAS SOLVED THIS PROBLEM? PLEASE HELP!

27 comments

hey-heyabout 4 hours ago

I think an underappreciated aspect is that we previously amortized the reading and comprehending over the time we spent designing and writing. I still find myself looking at changes expecting that I can review it in a few minutes when I am in effect coming in cold. That part of the job has changed, but fwiw it isn't so different than the experience I had reviewing another team's changes when I didn't know their services.

I have found the right harness helps, if you have a setup that gives you memory, specs and a graph-based understanding (that part is key) you can be very productive. For me, that's because being able to understand the big picture helps, the challenge of reading the code is always there but starting with 'this method/class/etc does X, so that means this is doing Y..." makes it easier and lets you come in warmer.

lerosabout 9 hours ago

I generally produce nearly the same code I'd write myself about 5x faster with AI. I don't just let Claude Code run wild for a long time and have a mess to review. I have it do small chunks I can quickly review, give it feedback, iterate, etc until I like the output, then I move on to the next step. This takes time of course but I've found it faster than reviewing a giant mess of a code review.

hollowturtleabout 3 hours ago

Share software you’re building

catchnear4321about 3 hours ago

if you were serious you would know this is an unserious bar to try and set.

runjakeabout 7 hours ago

Yes. The whole time. But, you still need to write good specs if you want well-designed software. Agents are not magic.

- Write good specs into files, usually Markdown.

- Go through the spec files with the agents, have it point out holes and problems, and then update the specs. Go through a few iterations of this and then start your agents on development.

Garbage in, garbage out.

daringrain32781about 6 hours ago

> Write good specs into files, usually Markdown.

When I'm building something new there's a good chance I don't know about a lot of problems (unknown unknowns). How do you overcome this with just spec files?

I keep coming back to this and the only way to develop properly without tons of hacks patching bugs afterwards is by working at a low level. I don't really write code but I work at the code level still and have Claude write each function and whatnot.

hollowturtleabout 3 hours ago

> Write good specs into files, usually Markdown.

Specs that gets systematically ignored way too often XD

ruffreyabout 6 hours ago

Are you still saving time or effort using coding agents this way? How much (estimated)?

drgoabout 10 hours ago

The way I have been doing it is to use LLMs to generate the code that I don't want to write: prototypes, tests, benchmarks, isolated,straightforward almost copy-paste code. I still write my own code as before because I enjoy doing that and because trying to understand and fix what an LLM generates and regenerates is harder and more tedious and time consuming than writing the code the way I want to do it in the first place.

aprdmabout 8 hours ago

What's the problem of the solution proposed ? Don't read/write code anymore. Have strong harness. That's how my team of ~30 has been operating for the most part.

The problem we are trying to solve was never to write code, was to solve business problems

hollowturtleabout 3 hours ago

Share the software you’re developing or you’re just a shiller

aprdmabout 3 hours ago

What is a shiller ? lol

You can look at people who are building on the public like this, for example, DHH with https://omarchy.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYFGCESmikA

I work in private software that I cannot share, but it's for a company you have heard of

AnimalMuppetabout 8 hours ago

"I don't understand the code anymore. It works." That's fine... today.

"I will never need to understand the code again" is a much different statement.

If you don't understand the code, and the code wasn't written by any human, when you're eventually painted into a corner, how hard is it going to be to get out? Will it be easier or harder than maintaining an understanding through however long it takes to get to that point?

You may be betting your company on the answer. How sure are you?

tripleeeabout 7 hours ago

How is this different than working at a company with hundreds of developers, on a massive codebase? Do you ever really understand the entirety of that?

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

27 comments

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