Re:The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers
by mkozlows on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @02:16AM
(#46430441)
Honestly, even this isn't really true anymore. With Opus 4.5 and 5.2 Codex in tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex CLI, "just do the thing" is a viable strategy for a shockingly large category of tasks.
Re:The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers
by CuriouslyC on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @09:45AM
(#46433788)
Just do the thing can produce functional code, but even with Opus4.5/Codex5.2, there are still plenty of moments where the way it decides to do something is cringe.
Re:The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers
by mkozlows on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @10:38AM
(#46434363)
Agree. But it's increasingly the case, IME, that for a a lot of tasks, you can start with that. If it does it well, great. If it does something stupid, it's easy enough to ask it to completely rework the stupid thing in a better way, and it can do it quickly. That's still a huge shift compared to the olden days (three months ago) where you needed to really break things down into small chunks for it to get to a success state.
Re:The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers
by leptons on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @04:31AM
(#46431298)
>You have to let go of the code looking exactly a certain way, but having code _work_ a certain way at a coarse level is doable and fairly easy.
So all that bullshit about "code smells" was nonsense.
Re:The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers
by CuriouslyC on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @10:38AM
(#46434365)
A lot of code smells matter more for humans than LLMs (and LLMs have their own unique code smells). For example, nested ternary operators are a great source of bugs in human code, but agents could care less, but humans handle multiple files with the same variable names and lots of duplicated code well, whereas this stuff confuses agents.
Re:The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers
by leptons on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @12:44PM
(#46435867)
>but agents could care less,
The phrase is "couldn't care less". If you "could care less" then you actually care about it. If you "couldn't care less" then there's no caring at all.
Re:The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers
by dent9 on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @10:42AM
(#46434415)
We are way beyond this. Now you use your plain text prompt to generate a requirements spec that the AI will follow when implementing your project
Re:The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers
by CuriouslyC on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @10:55AM
(#46434560)
Kiro is just trying to build a product around exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not a fan, because it's simultaneously too heavyweight and agents don't respect all the details of the specs it creates enough to make the time investment in super-detailed specs worthwhile.
I have a spec driven development tool I've been working on that generates structured specs that can be used to do automatic code generation. This is both faster and more robust.
You have to let go of the code looking exactly a certain way, but having code _work_ a certain way at a coarse level is doable and fairly easy.