Essentially all software is augmented with agentic development now, or if not, built with technology or on platforms that is
It's like complaining about the availability of the printing press because it proliferated tabloid production, while preferring beautifully hand-crafted tomes. It's reactively trendy to hate on it because of the vulgar production it enables and to elevate the artisanal extremes that escape its apparent influence
It's really not as integral as you make it sound. If I make one PR on a widely used open source tool with a small fix, is most software development augmented by me?
Outside of simply not being true, the sentiment of what you're saying isn't much different than:
"Essentially all software is augmented with Stack Overflow now, or if not, built with technology or on platforms that is."
Agentic development isn't a panacea nor as widespread as you claim. I'd wager that the vast majority of developers treat AI is a more specified search engine to point them in the direction they're looking for.
AI hallucination is still as massive problem. Can't tell you the number of times I've used agentic prompting with a top model that writes code for a package based on the wrong version number or flat out invents functionality that doesn't exist.
I just cannot fathom how people can say something like this today, agentic tools have now passed an inflection point. People want to point out the short comings and fully ignore that you can now make a fully functioning iPhone app in a day without knowing swift or front end development? That I can at my company do two projects simultaneously, both of them done in about 1/4 the time and one would not have even been attempted before due to the SWE headcount you would have to steal. There are countless examples I have in my own personal projects that just are such an obvious counter example to the moaning “I appreciate the craft” people or “yea this will never work because people still have to read the code” (today sure and this is now made more manageable by good quality agents, tomorrow no. No you won’t need to read code.)
I've found that the effort required to get a good outcome is roughly equal to the effort of doing it myself.
If I do it myself, I get the added bonus of actually understanding what the code is doing, which makes debugging any issues down the line way easier. It's also in generally better for teams b/c you can ask the 'owner' of a part of the codebase what their intuition is on an issue (trying to have AI fill in for this purpose has been underwhelming for me so far).
Trying to maintain a vibecoded codebase essentially involves spelunking though a non-familliar codebase every time manual action is needed to fix an issue (including reviewing/verifying the output of an AI tool's fix for the issue).
(For small/pinpointed things, it has been very good. e.g.: write a python script to comb through this CSV and print x details about it/turn this into a dashboard)
In sonnet 4 and even 4.5 I would have said you are absolutely right, and in many cases it slows you down especially when you don’t know enough to sniff trouble.
Opus 4.5 and 4.6 is where those instances have gone down, waaay down (though still true). Two personal projects I had abandoned after sonnet built a large pile of semi working cruft it couldn’t quite reason about, opus 4.6 does it in almost one shot.
You are right about learning but consider: you can educate yourself along the way — in some cases it’s no substitute for writing the code yourself, and in many cases you learn a ton more because it’s an excellent teacher and you can try out ideas to see which work best or get feedback on them. I feel I have learned a TON about the space though unlike when I code it myself I may not be extremely comfortable with the details. I would argue we are about 30% of the way to the point where it’s not even no longer relevant it’s a disservice to your company to be writing things yourself.
There are other things very good "at some range of common tasks". For example, stackoverflow snippets, libraries, bash spaghetti and even some no-code/low-code tools.
What part of Voyager I and Voyager II are "augmented with agentic development?"
Surely if all software is augmented with agentic development now, our most important space probes have had their software augmented too, right?
What about my blog that I serve static pages on? What about the xray machine my dentist uses? What about the firmware in my toaster? Does the New York Stock Exchange use AI to action stock trades? What about my telescope's ACSOM driver?
You’re talking about a 1970s satellite? I guess you win the argument?
Blog: I use AI to make and blog developers are using agentic tools
X-ray machine: again a little late here, plus if you want to start dragging in places that likely have a huge amount of beaurocracy I don’t know that that’s very fair
Firmware in your toaster: cmon these are old basic things, if it’s new firmware maybe? But probably not? These are not strong examples
NYSE to action on stock trades; no they don’t use AI to action on stock trades (that would be dumb and slow and horribly inefficient and non-deterministic), but may very well now be using AI to work on the codebase that does
Let’s try to find maybe more impactful examples than small embodied components in toasters and telescopes, 1970s era telescopes that are already past our solar system.
Im saying you’re missing the point and the spirit of the argument. Yes, you are right, voyager doesn’t use agentic AI! I don’t even think the other examples you used are as agentic free as you think. They may or may not be! What’s the point you want to make?
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
With openclaw we won't need to make event those apps.
Essentially all software is augmented with agentic development now, or if not, built with technology or on platforms that is
It's like complaining about the availability of the printing press because it proliferated tabloid production, while preferring beautifully hand-crafted tomes. It's reactively trendy to hate on it because of the vulgar production it enables and to elevate the artisanal extremes that escape its apparent influence
It's really not as integral as you make it sound. If I make one PR on a widely used open source tool with a small fix, is most software development augmented by me?
Outside of simply not being true, the sentiment of what you're saying isn't much different than:
"Essentially all software is augmented with Stack Overflow now, or if not, built with technology or on platforms that is."
Agentic development isn't a panacea nor as widespread as you claim. I'd wager that the vast majority of developers treat AI is a more specified search engine to point them in the direction they're looking for.
AI hallucination is still as massive problem. Can't tell you the number of times I've used agentic prompting with a top model that writes code for a package based on the wrong version number or flat out invents functionality that doesn't exist.
I just cannot fathom how people can say something like this today, agentic tools have now passed an inflection point. People want to point out the short comings and fully ignore that you can now make a fully functioning iPhone app in a day without knowing swift or front end development? That I can at my company do two projects simultaneously, both of them done in about 1/4 the time and one would not have even been attempted before due to the SWE headcount you would have to steal. There are countless examples I have in my own personal projects that just are such an obvious counter example to the moaning “I appreciate the craft” people or “yea this will never work because people still have to read the code” (today sure and this is now made more manageable by good quality agents, tomorrow no. No you won’t need to read code.)
I've found that the effort required to get a good outcome is roughly equal to the effort of doing it myself.
If I do it myself, I get the added bonus of actually understanding what the code is doing, which makes debugging any issues down the line way easier. It's also in generally better for teams b/c you can ask the 'owner' of a part of the codebase what their intuition is on an issue (trying to have AI fill in for this purpose has been underwhelming for me so far).
Trying to maintain a vibecoded codebase essentially involves spelunking though a non-familliar codebase every time manual action is needed to fix an issue (including reviewing/verifying the output of an AI tool's fix for the issue).
(For small/pinpointed things, it has been very good. e.g.: write a python script to comb through this CSV and print x details about it/turn this into a dashboard)
In sonnet 4 and even 4.5 I would have said you are absolutely right, and in many cases it slows you down especially when you don’t know enough to sniff trouble.
Opus 4.5 and 4.6 is where those instances have gone down, waaay down (though still true). Two personal projects I had abandoned after sonnet built a large pile of semi working cruft it couldn’t quite reason about, opus 4.6 does it in almost one shot.
You are right about learning but consider: you can educate yourself along the way — in some cases it’s no substitute for writing the code yourself, and in many cases you learn a ton more because it’s an excellent teacher and you can try out ideas to see which work best or get feedback on them. I feel I have learned a TON about the space though unlike when I code it myself I may not be extremely comfortable with the details. I would argue we are about 30% of the way to the point where it’s not even no longer relevant it’s a disservice to your company to be writing things yourself.
I didn’t say essentially all software is vibe coded. You already agree with me that it’s very good at some range of common tasks.
There are other things very good "at some range of common tasks". For example, stackoverflow snippets, libraries, bash spaghetti and even some no-code/low-code tools.
ok
What part of Voyager I and Voyager II are "augmented with agentic development?"
Surely if all software is augmented with agentic development now, our most important space probes have had their software augmented too, right?
What about my blog that I serve static pages on? What about the xray machine my dentist uses? What about the firmware in my toaster? Does the New York Stock Exchange use AI to action stock trades? What about my telescope's ACSOM driver?
You’re talking about a 1970s satellite? I guess you win the argument?
Blog: I use AI to make and blog developers are using agentic tools
X-ray machine: again a little late here, plus if you want to start dragging in places that likely have a huge amount of beaurocracy I don’t know that that’s very fair
Firmware in your toaster: cmon these are old basic things, if it’s new firmware maybe? But probably not? These are not strong examples
NYSE to action on stock trades; no they don’t use AI to action on stock trades (that would be dumb and slow and horribly inefficient and non-deterministic), but may very well now be using AI to work on the codebase that does
Let’s try to find maybe more impactful examples than small embodied components in toasters and telescopes, 1970s era telescopes that are already past our solar system.
The denial runs deep
So you admit that AI isn't in every software, and yet somehow I'm the one in denial?
Im saying you’re missing the point and the spirit of the argument. Yes, you are right, voyager doesn’t use agentic AI! I don’t even think the other examples you used are as agentic free as you think. They may or may not be! What’s the point you want to make?
Huh? Software under development obviously not software made before these tools existed