this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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Well, yeah....
Most of the time it doesn't work, rarely it does.
Intermittent rewards are what we're wired for. That's why random rewards/acknowledgment tickle our brains more than standard rewards we know are coming.
That's the reason there's such a big push "to just try it".
It's the same strategy the first crack dealers used
It feels so weird to read lemmy, as if I'm living in a different reality. To me, most of the time an agent can oneshot a ticket (if it has a good, non-vague description) or at least do 80-90% that can be fixed with several changes or prompts, and only odd tasks need more manual investigations than that.
Surely you still need a dev oversight and someone needs to do tech plans & lead the projects, but that's not like anything people experience here.
For the little stuff sure. Most of us are the ones that handle the odd tasks.
AI analysis of the code flow & AI-assisted debug (placing print statements, reproducing the issue, duping the print into it) transforms some 2-3 day investigations into half a day of work.
I can believe that an agent can do 80% of a competent job. But the 80/20 rule posits that the 20% is the hard part, the part that actually justifies your salary. If a human is not going to go in and do that 20% (which might be 80% of the effort), then having the AI do the easiest 80% doesn't gain you anything at all.
It depends on the task. Oneshotting 80% of the new feature and then failing to pick up on details can leave hard part.
But oneshotting even 30% of UI tests based on QA regression means you have 30% of regression covered. Ofc you need to verify if the test is indeed covering the test case, and for a big volume of tests it takes time, but it's nowhere near what it takes to actually write the tests.
I’m in the same reality as you, but usually I don’t bother to write too much about it on lemmy - people here don’t seem to appreciate different opinions on AI. But you’re not the only one :)
Outrage is always louder than agreement. If 1% of people hate a thing, but they really hate it, there'll be 10 articles about how it's bad and one article about how it's good, because something being good doesn't get clicks. The people who find it useful or good or even are just fine with it just get on with their lives.
Yeah 100%, an agent failing at what I want it to do is extremely rare now, like, a 1% chance at most, and it's usually easily fixed. I think most people with this experience aren't developers at all in a professional sense and therefore don't have the oversight to write a prompt properly with well defined goals and scope, or they're using the free version or something.
The study methodology is also extremely dubious to boot. This is just getting clicks due to pure anti-ai sentiment. I have my own issues with AI too, but this is just classic internet clickbait.
They're probably talking about the free version of gemini or something.
Anthropic claims that Mythos has low low low hallucination rate of just 40% in its System Card.
LLMs outputting code solving this exact task is a compound function of luck, with non determined a priori chance of success and unknown a priori cost.
This is my main disappointment with agentic coding. Prompting is fine, quality assurance is there from the start. Greenfield, couldn't care less. Established enterprise code? This is a minefield.
If the tokens were 10 to 100 times cheaper, then it would be a maybe.
I also hate how it makes half of my senior engineers dumber.
I hate AI too but that doesn't change how impressive the results can be. Once they figure out analog computing with memristors cost isn't going to be nearly the issue it is today.
? Never said that.
My apologies. I hate that it makes people stupid too.