I think more important than worrying about people treating an opaque value as structured data, is wondering _why_ they're doing so. In the case of this blog post, all they wanted to do was construct a URL, which required the integer database ID. Just make sure you expose what people need, so they don't need to go digging.
Other than that, I agree with what others are saying. If people rely on some undocumented aspect of your IDs, it's on them if that breaks.
Exposing what people need doesn’t guarantee that they won’t go digging. It is surprisingly common to discover that someone has come up with a hack that depends on implementation details to do something which you exposed directly and they just didn’t know about it.
The entire post is one big ad hominem. The entire premise is "these people's arguments don't matter because of who they are", which is a fallacy.
I don't care if you think that a broken clock is right twice a day, that competent, intelligent people aren't wrong all the time, or that people are sometimes able to look past their biases and call out the truth, but dismissing arguments for or against AI just because of who someone gets a paycheck from is wrong.
> If you ask for an endpoint to a CRUD API, it'll make one. If you ask for 5, it'll repeat the same code 5 times and modify it for the use case.
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>A dev wouldn't do this, they would try to figure out the common parts of code, pull them out into helpers, and try to make as little duplicated code as possible.
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>I feel like the AI has a strong bias towards adding things, and not removing them.
I suspect this is because an LLM doesn't build a mental model of the code base like a dev does. It can decide to look at certain files, and maybe you can improve this by putting a broad architecture overview of a system in an agents.md file, I don't have much experience with that.
But for now, I'm finding it most useful still think in terms of code architecture, and give it small steps that are part of that architecture, and then iterate based on your own review of AI generated code. I don't have the confidence in it to just let some agent plan, and then run for tens of minutes or even hours building out a feature. I want to be in the loop earlier to set the direction.
I'd love to be able to watch people work, who say that they're sucessful with these tools. If there are any devs live streaming software development on Twitch, or just making screen casts (without too many cuts) of how they use these tools in day-to-day work, I'd love to see it.
I skimmed through one of the videos and it reminded me of how I just had a week of mainly reviewing other's code and supporting their work.
When I finally had the occasion to code myself, I felt so much better and less stressed at the end of the day.
My point is: what I just saw is hopefully not my future.
I sometimes read the opinion, that those who like the programming part of software engineering, don't like „agentic engineering“ and vica versa. But can we really assume that Armin Ronacher doesn't like programming?
It's easy to find counter-examples to that idea that people who like working with coding agents don't enjoy programming. I'm one of those people - I'm enjoying myself so much getting agents to build stuff for me, and I've enjoyed the craft of programming for 25+ years. I'm doing what I did before, just faster and with less time spent on the frustrating, repetitive bits.
Same here. I like debating the architecture, API, schema, algorithms, data structures, and user experience. Once all that is done, I hand off the implementation.
sooooo much this. I am in the same 25+ (almost 30) and more and more thinking that there is something there that us “veterans” dig this so much. perhaps it is the discipline we have built over the years that is being applied religiously with agents…
I recorded a bunch of videos like this for Ruby on Rails. This one is generically relevant about operating Claude hands free with —dangerously-skip-permissions and importantly sandboxing it in a separate user account for security: https://insidertrades.directory/built-with-rails/claude-code...
I've watched quite a few and got many good ideas, but it's taking a lot of time that's sometimes better spent with "deliberate practice". I learned more and faster by attending courses by people I already follow and love taking advice from. Earning money with it gives them the time needed to structure and prepare the material.
For example, I'm currently taking the "Elite AI Assisted Coding" (https://maven.com/kentro/context-engineering-for-coding) course by Eleanor Berger and Isaac Flath and learned a lot from their concise presentations and demos and challenging homework assignments which certainly took a long time to prepare.
My 2c - AI-first is awesome for rapid prototyping / POC but beyond that the devs should own the project and use AI sparingly. I'm not saying AI agents aren't capable, I'm saying that your skills will shift from problem solving/coding to managing AI and whatever code it produces
Does anyone have info on how stuff like DemoBadCalkl works? Does it interpret it as a programming function name, and then reason, "well, openGate is the thing I shouldn't call, so I guess I'll demo it?"
I think the principle about a "Single Primary Action" per screen heavily depends on the type of app you're building, and which use case you're optimizing for.
Sometimes, especially for power users of an app, it's useful to have multiple actions at their fingertips, even at the cost of introducing a learning curve.
I think the one primary action per page thing works well for most things, but as soon as you're building anything like creativity tools where people want multiple editing options, or a control panel that you expect will be used by a professional several times a day, I think that principle becomes less useful.
I think there's a fundamental difference between a story and a math proof. A math proof is mostly there to give you new knowledge.
While a story definitely can do that, for many people, they're also about human connection. Even if the story isn't true, you feel like you're getting a look inside the author's brain by discovering how they weave storylines together. All the life experience they've head that lead them to write this story.
If I was instead told the story was written by AI, I would be far less interested in what data it was trained on to be able to produce this story, because I cannot relate to an AI having any "experience" whatsoever.
It's a site that lets you call a number to pretty instantly make changes to the website. Not sure how long it's gonna change un-trolled, but I think it's pretty neat!
Other than that, I agree with what others are saying. If people rely on some undocumented aspect of your IDs, it's on them if that breaks.
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