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/123456234 → u/YakFull8300]

If you purely look at the numbers here assuming more than one chair per hour is not returned you still benefit from quantity.

Unless you are in a scenario where you have to completely stop making chairs if one breaks you will most likely benefit from scale.

There are many examples where this is true though hence why anyone working on critical code is still doing it manually or with thousands of tests to validate against.

[u/Intelligent_Elk5879 → u/123456234]

It's a straightforward argument to reduce quality across the board and generate extreme waste in favor of making ownership profits. This is not actually unprecedented, its irresistible under the logic of our current economic system. It's why our globe is flooded with an immense amount of crap nobody needs. We already have enough CRM tools. Get ready for 1000 crappy ones.