The expanding scope of coding agents

It’s time for another post about LLMs! I know, I know, that’s basically all anyone talks about these days. But that sort of makes sense: it’s what a significant number of software engineers spend their day using. And they’re changing so rapidly. Back in May last year, I said: But how good is it at actually writing code? It’s like having a keen but not particularly thorough Junior Engineer at your beck and call. If you give it a clearly defined task and guidance on how to implement it (and maybe some feedback as it suggests changes), it’s more than capable of doing it. If you don’t give it enough guidance it tends to go more off the rails. I tried having it generate a simple application from scratch with minimal technical guidance and no review of what it was doing, and it made such a mess of it I decided it was quicker to throw it away and start again by hand. What I was describing there basically amounted to “the coding agent can be responsible for a function, or a group of functions…