I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts.
My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding.
And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application that I intend to open source. It's about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline. I'm doing 24x7 mutation testing on a dedicated box against the accounting engine and temporal systems. I even have specialized agents doing audits against Regulation Z (US banking law) criteria so the app models the required behavior of banks.
Most of my complaints about everything are nits, like the overly verbose and dense way LLMs communicate with me. Or their predisposition to add, add, and add more stuff when proper engineering practices are more often about subtraction (but I've built mitigation guardrails against a lot of that).
I'm not sure if this is snark or not, but yes, there is something fundamentally interesting about the fact that "personal finance tracker" is now a project with the same craft valence as a todo list, the "hello world" of the last 20 years of programming. It also says something new about todo list programs, and programs of that ilk/level of complexity: they're now subthreshold programming, or, the way I look at things, a level of programming now accessible to nonprogrammers.
I got through a trial using a document manager I vibe coded in two days. No crashes, no runaway memory usage with several gigs of PDFs. All my depo transcripts, expert reports, etc, indexed, with a terminal window integrated so i can ask Grok to “pull up the testimony on the first day when that guy said that thing.” The app has an API so the AI can directly control what documents i’m looking at and jump me to the right places. All I had to do was tell Claude to “expose all the document viewing functionality through applescript,” then tell Grok to “read the applescript dictionary and write yourself a skill.”
It’s like ye olde times when we had overqualified efficient paralegals who could do stuff like that.
> Or their predisposition to add, add, and add more stuff when proper engineering practices are more often about subtraction (but I've built mitigation guardrails against a lot of that).
> a… personal financial management application… about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline
Just how much functionality are you getting out of that? It's hard for me to imagine that people want that much out of such a program. I just keep a spreadsheet. (Yes, LibreOffice is also very bloated.)
My wife was a diehard YNAB user before we met but it went by the wayside once we merged finances. She wanted to get back to better managing our money and started using Google Sheets and then got stuck. She asked me for help trying to create a pivot table and like any good engineer, I built her an entirely new application instead.
In my defense though, it does way more than a spreadsheet. Stuff like OCRing screenshots of bank transactions with a specialized, locally-hosted LLM to avoid data harvesters like Plaid. This became an entirely separate subsystem with verification, automated model benchmarking, prompt provenance, etc.
You'd be surprised at how quickly edge cases start to pile up when an accounting system makes contact with the real world. (If you buy something on a credit card and then return it after your statement closes but before your payment is due, do you still owe a minimum payment based on that purchase? Well... depends on your bank. Capital One and Chase: yes, US Bank: no.)
> Just how much functionality are you getting out of that?
I'm still dogfooding it. It's a pretty opinionated app that has things a month-end closing ceremony, reconciliation processes, envelope-based budgeting cycles. So unfortunately my feedback cycle is largely locked to the calendar. But my wife absolutely loves it so far.
> do you still owe a minimum payment based on that purchase?
I'm skeptical that the UX is improved much by having the app know the answer. The bank tells you what to pay, a month beforehand. The user has to get that number from the bank anyway, to be sure they don't incur fees. Your app should just pull it from the statements, not independently calculate it.
> I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts.
> And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application that I intend to open source. It's about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline.
Indeed; non-overlapping Overton windows.
edit: I'm going bluntly ask, after pondering this more: Is this satire?
i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt.
There's a reason why we talk about software development lifecycle, design, architecture, testing ... It's because it's been the most reliable way to build and ship software. We shouldn't expect discard this and expect agents to perform well outside of this.
I'm treating LLM agents as junior devs who happen to have vast knowledge of software engineering. As their team leader i make them go through planning, implementation, bug sweeping cycles using strict workflows. And it works quite well, i've been working on several large projects (1M+ LOC java,typescript,c/c++) and by any measure the projects are healthy. Sure the code isn't that beautiful, sure i'd have written things differently but it's pretty good nonetheless.
Shameless plug here: i've been also working on https://kodfactory.com, the code factory i've built to work on these large projects with workflows, reviews, etc ... I'm cleaning things up to open source it later.
In effect, I’ve always wanted a pair programmer agent, not a zero to one programming agent. Unfortunately models these days are mostly of the latter kind and it has caused a major disruption in the way I work. I’d much rather appreciate a small model making fast and specific edits that I ask if it, rather than ingesting 20 files to make changes, and then starting to write tests, etc.
Hyperbolic, but I'm seeing hints of this – Models refusing to do pair work with an engineer and trust their input, instead mandating having full control over something. Friends switching back from Fable/Opus 5 to Opus 4.8 just so they can have some input.
Anthropic especially right now seem to be optimising for doing the whole task with no input. That's fine when that's the only task, and it's fine when you don't care how the sausage is made, but it's not fine for actual software engineering.
I’ve never had an agent fail to write the actual implementation. Has it done so badly, yes, but not nothing but tests. This sounds to me like a rare case that doesn’t generalize.
If the general idea is that these agents write too many tests, sure I guess? ‘Too many tests’ doesn’t sound like a failure case of engineering to me; typically software has had too few tests. Also, a lot of the power of these agents is their ability to self-verify and correct, which the test loop is a part of.
Nobody is making you pay this supposed tax. Just tell it not to write tests.
I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts.
My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding.
And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application that I intend to open source. It's about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline. I'm doing 24x7 mutation testing on a dedicated box against the accounting engine and temporal systems. I even have specialized agents doing audits against Regulation Z (US banking law) criteria so the app models the required behavior of banks.
Most of my complaints about everything are nits, like the overly verbose and dense way LLMs communicate with me. Or their predisposition to add, add, and add more stuff when proper engineering practices are more often about subtraction (but I've built mitigation guardrails against a lot of that).
Personal finance tracker - the TODO app of 2026.
I'm not sure if this is snark or not, but yes, there is something fundamentally interesting about the fact that "personal finance tracker" is now a project with the same craft valence as a todo list, the "hello world" of the last 20 years of programming. It also says something new about todo list programs, and programs of that ilk/level of complexity: they're now subthreshold programming, or, the way I look at things, a level of programming now accessible to nonprogrammers.
I replaced my todo list tracker with a vibe coded one, while waiting for things to happen in the middle of a trial. We're living in the future.
It's fucking weird and I think we're not talking about it enough.
I got through a trial using a document manager I vibe coded in two days. No crashes, no runaway memory usage with several gigs of PDFs. All my depo transcripts, expert reports, etc, indexed, with a terminal window integrated so i can ask Grok to “pull up the testimony on the first day when that guy said that thing.” The app has an API so the AI can directly control what documents i’m looking at and jump me to the right places. All I had to do was tell Claude to “expose all the document viewing functionality through applescript,” then tell Grok to “read the applescript dictionary and write yourself a skill.”
It’s like ye olde times when we had overqualified efficient paralegals who could do stuff like that.
>the "hello world" of the last 20 years of programming
The "hello world" is mostly for making sure your toolchain is working correctly.
Yes, and the todo app is for making sure you have the most basic understanding required to hold it right.
> Or their predisposition to add, add, and add more stuff when proper engineering practices are more often about subtraction (but I've built mitigation guardrails against a lot of that).
> a… personal financial management application… about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline
Just how much functionality are you getting out of that? It's hard for me to imagine that people want that much out of such a program. I just keep a spreadsheet. (Yes, LibreOffice is also very bloated.)
My wife was a diehard YNAB user before we met but it went by the wayside once we merged finances. She wanted to get back to better managing our money and started using Google Sheets and then got stuck. She asked me for help trying to create a pivot table and like any good engineer, I built her an entirely new application instead.
In my defense though, it does way more than a spreadsheet. Stuff like OCRing screenshots of bank transactions with a specialized, locally-hosted LLM to avoid data harvesters like Plaid. This became an entirely separate subsystem with verification, automated model benchmarking, prompt provenance, etc.
You'd be surprised at how quickly edge cases start to pile up when an accounting system makes contact with the real world. (If you buy something on a credit card and then return it after your statement closes but before your payment is due, do you still owe a minimum payment based on that purchase? Well... depends on your bank. Capital One and Chase: yes, US Bank: no.)
> Just how much functionality are you getting out of that?
I'm still dogfooding it. It's a pretty opinionated app that has things a month-end closing ceremony, reconciliation processes, envelope-based budgeting cycles. So unfortunately my feedback cycle is largely locked to the calendar. But my wife absolutely loves it so far.
> do you still owe a minimum payment based on that purchase?
I'm skeptical that the UX is improved much by having the app know the answer. The bank tells you what to pay, a month beforehand. The user has to get that number from the bank anyway, to be sure they don't incur fees. Your app should just pull it from the statements, not independently calculate it.
That's a valid point.
But ad_fontes was describing an edge case and that was an excellent example of one (regardless of whether it was an important or necessary feature).
> I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts.
> And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application that I intend to open source. It's about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline.
Indeed; non-overlapping Overton windows.
edit: I'm going bluntly ask, after pondering this more: Is this satire?
No disrespect but 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline sounds truly terrible.
If your build scripts are more than 100-300 LOC you are doing something very wrong.
i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt.
There's a reason why we talk about software development lifecycle, design, architecture, testing ... It's because it's been the most reliable way to build and ship software. We shouldn't expect discard this and expect agents to perform well outside of this.
I'm treating LLM agents as junior devs who happen to have vast knowledge of software engineering. As their team leader i make them go through planning, implementation, bug sweeping cycles using strict workflows. And it works quite well, i've been working on several large projects (1M+ LOC java,typescript,c/c++) and by any measure the projects are healthy. Sure the code isn't that beautiful, sure i'd have written things differently but it's pretty good nonetheless.
Shameless plug here: i've been also working on https://kodfactory.com, the code factory i've built to work on these large projects with workflows, reviews, etc ... I'm cleaning things up to open source it later.
I feel this, yes.
In effect, I’ve always wanted a pair programmer agent, not a zero to one programming agent. Unfortunately models these days are mostly of the latter kind and it has caused a major disruption in the way I work. I’d much rather appreciate a small model making fast and specific edits that I ask if it, rather than ingesting 20 files to make changes, and then starting to write tests, etc.
Hyperbolic, but I'm seeing hints of this – Models refusing to do pair work with an engineer and trust their input, instead mandating having full control over something. Friends switching back from Fable/Opus 5 to Opus 4.8 just so they can have some input.
Anthropic especially right now seem to be optimising for doing the whole task with no input. That's fine when that's the only task, and it's fine when you don't care how the sausage is made, but it's not fine for actual software engineering.
I’ve never had an agent fail to write the actual implementation. Has it done so badly, yes, but not nothing but tests. This sounds to me like a rare case that doesn’t generalize.
If the general idea is that these agents write too many tests, sure I guess? ‘Too many tests’ doesn’t sound like a failure case of engineering to me; typically software has had too few tests. Also, a lot of the power of these agents is their ability to self-verify and correct, which the test loop is a part of.
Nobody is making you pay this supposed tax. Just tell it not to write tests.