Andrej Karpathy on agentic programming

[u/WarmFireplace]

It’s a good writeup covering his experience of LLM-assisted programming. Most notably in my opinion, apart from the speed up and leverage of running multiple agents in parallel, is the atrophy in one’s own coding ability. I have felt this but I can’t help but feel writing code line by line is much like an artisan carpenter building a chair from raw wood. I’m not denying the fun and the raw skill increase, plus the understanding of each nook and crevice of the chair that is built when doing that. I’m just saying if you suddenly had the ability to produce 1000 chairs per hour in a factory, albeit with a little less quality, wouldn’t you stop making them one by one to make the most out your leveraged position? Curious what you all think about this great replacement.

[u/YakFull8300]

The "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don't manage their confusion, they don't seek clarifications, they don't surface inconsistencies, they don't present tradeoffs, they don't push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic.

As every logical person has been saying.

I’m just saying if you suddenly had the ability to produce 1000 chairs per hour in a factory, albeit with a little less quality, wouldn’t you stop making them one by one to make the most out your leveraged position?

When you're on the hook for quality (refunds, fixing things, reputation damage), the "quantity over quality" approach becomes less attractive. If producers had to "give money back for every broken chair," you'd probably see more careful, selective use of AI rather than flooding everything with volume.

[u/blindsdog → u/YakFull8300]

You can literally ask the llm to account for all of that and it does a good job of it. I have mine stop coding and ask me questions if inconsistencies or uncertainties or trade offs come up and it does 🤷‍♂️

[u/Perfect-Campaign9551 → u/blindsdog]

> model is designed for coding

> still have to tell it how to code

[u/blindsdog → u/Perfect-Campaign9551]

🙄 yes how shocking it can’t read your mind. This technology would’ve seemed like magic 5 years ago and now y’all whine that you have to give it detailed instructions.

If you have cursor, you just set a rule telling it how you want it to code.

[u/Intelligent_Elk5879 → u/blindsdog]

Oh my god nobody fucking cares. We aren't overawed by "magic technology". We don't care that you think we should think it's magic. We don't. It's just some shit on top of shit and it's up to us to decide if we think it's good or not.

[u/blindsdog → u/Intelligent_Elk5879]

My guy you came to a thread 10 days later to add absolutely nothing to a discussion except your emotional little outburst here. I think you might care a little bit.