Good devops practices make AI coding easier!
We’ve started more aggressively linting our code because a) it makes the ai better and b) we made the ai do the tedious work of fixing our existing lint violations.
I've seen this complaint a lot, and I honestly don't get it. I have a feeling it helps LLMs write better code. And removing comments can be done in the reading pass, somewhat forcing you to go through the code line by line and "accept" the code that way. In the grand scheme of things, if this were the only downside to using LLM-based coding agents, I think we've come a long way.
Yea, this happens to me too. Does it say something about the tool?
It's not like we are talking about luddites who refuse to adopt the technology, but rather a group who is very open to use it. And yet sometimes, we "forget".
I very rarely regret forgetting. I feel a combination of (a) it's good practice, I don't want my skills to wither and (b) I don't think the AI would've been that much faster, considering the cost of thinking the prompt and that I was probably in flow.
Now I only wish for an Product Manager model that can render the code and provide feedback on the UI issues. Using Cursor and Gemini, we were able to get a impressively polished UI, but it needed a lot of guidance.
> I haven’t yet come across an agent that can write beautiful code.
Yes, the AI don't mind hundreds of lines of if statements, as long as it works it's happy. It's another thing that needs several rounds of feedback and adjustments to make it human-friendly. I guess you could argue that human-friendly code is soon a thing of the past, so maybe there's no point fixing that part.
I think improving the feedback loops and reducing the frequency of "obvious" issues would do a lot to increase the one-shot quality and raise the productivity gains even further.
jbellis•3h ago