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The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

blog.nilenso.com

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Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#31
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200k DAU, 7 million registered, ~50 microservices, large monorepo

You have 50 microservices for 200k daily users? Let me guess this has something to do with AI?

No, It has something to do with experience. The system is highly integrated to other platforms and have to stay afloat during burst loads.

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#32
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last week I wanted to generate some test data for some unit tests for a certain function in a C codebase. It's an audio codec library, so I could have modified the function to dump its inputs to disk and then run the library on any audio file and then hardcoded the input into the unit tests. Instead, I decided I wanted to save a few bytes and wanted to look at generating dummy data dynamically. I wanted to try out Cl…

There’s been a lot of noise about Claude performance degradation, and the current best option is probably Codex, but this still surprises me. It sounds like it succeeded on the hard part, then stumbled on the easy bit. Just two questions, if you don’t mind satisfying my curiosity. - Did you tell it to write C? Or better yet, what was the prompt? You can use Claude --resume to easily find that. - Which model? (Sooner…

Sooner -> Sonnet

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#34
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

liszper: > most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today Also liszper: oh, you tried the current approach and don’t agree with me? Well you just don’t know what you are doing.

Yes, exactly. Learning new things is hard. Personally it took me about 200 hours to get started, and since then ~2500 hours to get familiar with the advanced techniques, and now I'm very happy with the results, managing extremely large codebases with LLM in production. For context before that I had ~15 years of experience coding the traditional way.

Has anyone else noticed the extreme dichotomy of developers using AI agents? Either AI agents essentially don't work, or they are apparently running legions of agents to produce some nebulous gigantic estate.

I think the crucial difference is that I do actually see evidence (ie the codebase) posted sometimes for the former, the latter could well be entirely mythos -- a 24 day old account evangelizing for the legion of agents story does kind of fit the theme.

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#35
I found out that summarizing a completed task and feeding it to a new context works better than staying on the same context for multiple tasks. So let’s say I have a sprint with tasks 1, 2 and 3. I start by creating a project with general information including the spec, git issues, code base, folder trees, etc then work on Task 1. When done I ask for a summary using a template, which gives me a txt file describing what the original goal was, what we changed and what the next steps are. Then I repeat the process for Task 2 and I feed the summary from Task 1. At least in ChatGPT keeping the same context for multiple tasks has lots of issues like speed, increased hallucinations, and ChatGPT referencing content from old files.

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#36
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many users is production and how large is extremely large.

200k DAU, 7 million registered, ~50 microservices, large monorepo

.. what is this thing and can we see it?

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#37
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, you sound like someone who is just getting familiar with these tools. 100 more hours spent with AI coding and you will be much more productive. Coding with AI is a slightly different skill from coding, similar how managing software engineers is different from writing software.

liszper: > most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today Also liszper: oh, you tried the current approach and don’t agree with me? Well you just don’t know what you are doing.

Lol, what is up with everyone assuming there's no learning curve to these things? If you applied this argument to literally any other tool you would be laughed at, for good reason.

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#38
And the value of AI as pushed to us by these companies is in doing larger units of work.

But... reviewing code is harder than writing code. Expressing how I want something to be done in natural language is incredibly hard.

So over time I'm spending a lot of energy in those things, and only getting it 80% right.

Not to mention I'm constantly in this highly suspicious mode, trying to pierce through the veil of my own prompt and the code generated, because it's the edge cases that make work hard.

The end result is exhaustion. There is no recharge. Plans are front-loaded, and then you switch to auditing mode.

Whereas with code you front-load a good amount of design, but you can make changes as you go, and since you know your own code the effort to make those are much lower.

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#39
I agree with the premise of the article, and have felt that we're probably seeing AI code gen tools being limited by the constraints being put on them by traditional source code management tools like git and GitHub. Those tools were designed for incremental changes (patches), and have worked well for humans to organize changes so they could be more easily reviewed, maintained and reasoned about. Units of work in the form of features, patches etc rely on "pull requests" which are a function of the above.

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#40
post #9
post #3

most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today thanks for the article, it's a good one

> most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today yes, just as was said each and every previous time OpenAI/anthropic shit out a new model "now it doesn't suck!"

She is choosing GPT5 as the good example? Maybe Claude, maybe..
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