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The highest quality codebase

gricha.dev

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Re: The highest quality codebase

#211

Post by airstrike »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #126
airstrike wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat tangential but interestingly I'd hate for Claude to make any changes with the intent of sticking to "DRY" or "Clean Code". Neither of those are things I follow, and either way design is better informed by the specific problems that need to be solved rather than by such general, prescriptive principles.

I'm not sure how to interpret someone saying they don't follow DRY. Do you meant taking it to the Zealous extreme, or do you abhor helper functions? Is this a "No True Scottsman" thing?

I just think DRY is overblown. I just let code grow. When parts of it become obvious to abstract, I refactor them into something self contained. I learned this from an ice wizard.

When I was younger, writing Python rather than Rust, I used to go out of my way to make everything DRY, DRY, DRY everywhere from the outset. Class-based views in Django come to mind.

Today, I just write code, and after it's working I go back and clean things up where applicable. Not because I'm "following a principle", but because it's what makes sense in that specific instance.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#212

Post by zelphirkalt »

tayo42 wrote: post #77
pdntspa wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me writing code is me spending 3/4 of my time wading through documentation and google searches. It's absolutely hell on my ADD. My ability to memorize is absolutely garbage. Throughout my career I've worked in like 10 different languages, and in any given project I'm usually working in at least 3 or 4. There's a lot of "now what is a map operation in this stupid fucking language called again?!" Claude writing code ge…

How do you end up with 3 to 4 languages in one project?

3 or 4 can very easily accumulate. For example: HTML, CSS as must know, plus some JS/TS (actually that's 2 langs!) for sprinkles of interactivity, backend in any proper backend language. Oh wait, there is a fifth language, SQL, because we need to access the database. Ah and those few shell scripts we need? Someone's gotta write those too. They may not always be full programming languages, but languages they are, and one needs to know them.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#214

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

whatshisface wrote: post #35
thevillagechief wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is exactly true. You will put in those hours.

In this vein, one of the biggest time-savers has turned out to be its ability to make me realize I don't want to do something.

I get that. But I think the AI-deriders are a bit nuts sometimes because while I’m not running around crying about AGI… it’s really damn nice to change the arguments of a function and have it just go everywhere and adjust every invocation of that function to work properly. Something that might take me 10-30 minutes is now seconds and it’s not outside of its reliability spectrum.

Vibe coding though, super deceptive!

Re: The highest quality codebase

#215

Post by bongodongobob »

hackernewds wrote: post #199
elzbardico wrote: post #85

LLMs have this strong bias towards generating code, because writing code is the default behavior from pre-training. Removing code, renaming files, condensing, and other edits is mostly a post-training stuff, supervised learning behavior. You have armies of developers across the world making 17 to 35 dollars an hour solving tasks step by step which are then basically used to generate prompt/responses pairs of desired…

> Writing code is the default behavior from pre-training what does this even mean? could you expand on it

He means that it is heavily biased to write code, not remove, condense, refactor, etc. It wants to generate more stuff, not less.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#216

Post by maddmann »

nosianu wrote: post #79
maddmann wrote: post #14

lol 5000 tests. Agentic code tools have a significant bias to add versus remove/condense. This leads to a lot of bloat and orphaned code. Definitely something that still needs to be solved for by agentic tools.

> Agentic code tools have a significant bias to add versus remove/condense. Your point stands uncontested by me, but I just wanted to mention that humans have that bias too. Random link (has the Nature study link): https://blog.benchsci.com/this-newly-proven-human-bias-cause... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_bias

Great point, interesting how agents somehow pick up the same bias.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#217

Post by skydhash »

neoromantique wrote: post #153
skydhash wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say notetaking would be a much bigger help than Claude at this point. There's a lot of methods to organize information that I believe would help you, better than an hallucination machine.

Notetaking with ADHD is another sort of hell to be honest. I absolutely can attest to what parent is saying, I have been developing software in Python for nearly a decade now and I still routinely look up the /basics/. LLM's have been a complete gamechanger to me, being able to reduce the friction of "ok let me google what I need in a very roundabout way my memory spit it out" to a fast and often inline llm lookup.

Looking up documentation is normal. If not, we wouldn't have the manual pages in Unix and such an emphasis on documentation in ecosystems like Lisp, Go, Python, Perl,... We even have cheatsheets and syntax references books because it's just so easy to forget the /basics/.

I said notetaking, but it's more about building your own index. In $WORK projects, I mostly use the browser bookmarks, the ticket system, the PR description and commits to contextually note things. In personal projects, I have an org-mode file (or a basic text file) and a lot of TODO comments.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#218

Post by maddmann »

oofbey wrote: post #53
maddmann wrote: post #14

lol 5000 tests. Agentic code tools have a significant bias to add versus remove/condense. This leads to a lot of bloat and orphaned code. Definitely something that still needs to be solved for by agentic tools.

Oh I’ve had agents remove tests plenty of times. Or cripple the tests so they pass but are useless - more common and harder to prompt against.

Ah true, that also can happen — in aggregate I think models will tend to expand codebases versus contract. Though, this is anecdotal and probably is something ai labs and coding agent companies are looking at now.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#219

Post by zelphirkalt »

thewebguyd wrote: post #165
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I want my AI to do laundry and dishes so I can code, not for my AI to code so I can do laundry and dishes”

This sums up my feelings almost exactly. I don't want LLMs, AI, and eventually Robots to take over the fun stuff. I want them to do the mundane, physical tasks like laundry and dishes, leave me to the fun creative stuff. But as we progress right now, the hype machine is pushing AI to take over art, photography, video, coding, etc. All the stuff I would rather be doing. Where's my house cleaning robot?

I would like to go even further and say: Those things, art, photography, video, coding ... They are forms of craft, human expression, creativity. They are part of what makes life interesting. So we are in the process of eliminating the interesting and creative parts, in the name of profit and productivity maxing (if any!). Maybe we can create the 100th online platform for the same thing soon 10x faster! Wow!

Of course this is a bit too black&white. There can still be a creative human being introducing nuance and differences, trying to get the automated tools to do things different in the details or some aspects. Question is, losing all those creative jobs (in absolute numbers of people doing them), what will we as society, or we as humanity become? What's the ETA on UBI, so that we can reap the benefits of what we automated away, instead of filling the pockets of a few?

Re: The highest quality codebase

#220

Post by blobbers »

I'm curious if anyone has written a "Principal Engineer" agents.md or CLAUDE.md style file that yields better results than the 'junior dev' results people are seeing here.

I've worked on writing some as a data scientist, and I have gotten the basic claude output to be much better; it makes some saner decisions, it validates and circles back to fix fits, etc.

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