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Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

bicameral-ai.com

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Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#21

Post by TrickyRick »

aurareturn wrote: post #20
monero-xmr wrote: post #2

First you must accept that engineering elegance != market value. Only certain applications and business models need the crème de le crème of engineers. LLM has been hollowing out the mid and lower end of engineering. But has not eroded highest end. Otherwise all the LLM companies wouldn’t pay for talent, they’d just use their own LLM.

LLM has been hollowing out the mid and lower end of engineering. But has not eroded highest end. Otherwise all the LLM companies wouldn’t pay for talent, they’d just use their own LLM. The talent isn't used for writing code anymore though. They're used for directing, which an LLM isn't very good at since it has limited real world experience, interacting with other humans, and goals. OpenAI has said they're slowing do…

Source: Trust me, bro. A company selling an AI model telling others their AI model is so good that it's building itself. What could possibly motivate them to say that?

Remember a few years ago when Sam Altman said we had to pause AI development for 6 months because otherwise we would have the singularity and it would end the world? Yeah, about that...

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#22

Post by friendzis »

locknitpicker wrote: post #15
WD-42 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value. You won’t see it right away which is probably where this sentiment is coming from, but it will absolutely catch up to you. Elegant code isn’t just for looks. It’s code that can still adapt weeks, months, years after it has shipped and created “business value”.

> I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value. That's a rather short-sighted opinion. Ask yourself how "inelegant code" find it's way into a codebase, even with working code review processes. The answer more often than not is what's typically referred to as tech debt driven development. Meaning, sometimes a ha…

You not only stumble upon a weird bug in your hacky solution that takes engineering weeks to debug, but your interfaces are fragile so feature velocity drops (bugs reproduce and unless you address reproduction rate you end up fixing bugs only) and things are so tightly coupled that every two line change is now multi-week rewrite.

Look at e.g. facebook. That site has not shipped a feature in years and every time they ship something it takes years to make it stable again. A year or so ago facebook recognized that decades of fighting abuse led them nowhere and instead of fixing the technical side they just modified policies to openly allow fake accounts :D Facebook is 99% moltbook bot-to-bot trafic at this point and they cannot do anything about it. Ironically, this is a good argument against code quality: if you manage to become large enough to become a monopoly, you can afford to fix tech debt later. In reality, there is one unicorn for every ten thousand of startups that crumbled under their own technical debt.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#23

Post by joshbee »

micw wrote: post #14

For me, AI is an enabler for things you can't do otherwise (or that would take many weeks of learning). But you still need to know how to do things properly in general, otherwise the results are bad. E.g. I'm a software architect and developer for many years. So I know already how to build software but I'm not familiar with every language or framework. AI enabled me to write other kind of software I never learned or…

I'm in the same boat. I've been taking on much more ambitious projects both at work and personally by collaborating with LLMs. There are many tasks that I know I could do myself but would require a ton of trial and error.

I've found giving the LLMs the input and output interfaces really help keep them on rails, while still being involved in the overall process without just blindly "vibe coding."

Having the AI also help with unit tests around business logic has been super helpful in addition to manual testing like normal. It feels like our overall velocity and code quality has been going up regardless of what some of these articles are saying.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#24

Post by anonzzzies »

lmm wrote: post #19
locknitpicker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value. That's a rather short-sighted opinion. Ask yourself how "inelegant code" find it's way into a codebase, even with working code review processes. The answer more often than not is what's typically referred to as tech debt driven development. Meaning, sometimes a ha…

Of course a bug is negative business value. Perhaps the benefit of shipping faster was worth the cost of introducing bugs, but that doesn't make it not a cost.

If a bug is present but there is no one who encounters it, is it negative business value?

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#25

Post by foxes »

So basically - "ai" - actually llms - are decent at what they are trained at - producing plausible text with a bunch of structure and constraints - and a lot of programming, boring work emails, reddit/hn comments, etc can fall into that. It still requires understanding to know when that diverges from something useful, it still is just plausible text, not some magic higher reasoning.

Are they something worth using up vast amounts of power and restructuring all of civilisation around? No

Are they worth giving more power to megacorps over? No

Its like tech doesn't understand consent and then partially the classic case of "disrupting x" - thinking that you know how to solve something in maths, cs, physics and then suddenly that means you can solve stuff in a completely different field.

llms are over indexed.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#26

Post by mirsadm »

micw wrote: post #14

For me, AI is an enabler for things you can't do otherwise (or that would take many weeks of learning). But you still need to know how to do things properly in general, otherwise the results are bad. E.g. I'm a software architect and developer for many years. So I know already how to build software but I'm not familiar with every language or framework. AI enabled me to write other kind of software I never learned or…

I use Claude Code a lot but one thing that really made me concerned was when I asked it about some ideas I have had which I am very familiar with. It's response was to constantly steer me away from what I wanted to do towards something else which was fine but a mediocre way to do things. It made me question how many times I've let it go off and do stuff without checking it thoroughly.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#27

Post by physicsguy »

mirsadm wrote: post #26
micw wrote: post #14

For me, AI is an enabler for things you can't do otherwise (or that would take many weeks of learning). But you still need to know how to do things properly in general, otherwise the results are bad. E.g. I'm a software architect and developer for many years. So I know already how to build software but I'm not familiar with every language or framework. AI enabled me to write other kind of software I never learned or…

I use Claude Code a lot but one thing that really made me concerned was when I asked it about some ideas I have had which I am very familiar with. It's response was to constantly steer me away from what I wanted to do towards something else which was fine but a mediocre way to do things. It made me question how many times I've let it go off and do stuff without checking it thoroughly.

I've had quite a bit of the "tell it to do something in a certain way", it does that at first, then a few messages of corrections and pointers, it forgets that constraint.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#28

Post by Balinares »

WD-42 wrote: post #8
monero-xmr wrote: post #2

First you must accept that engineering elegance != market value. Only certain applications and business models need the crème de le crème of engineers. LLM has been hollowing out the mid and lower end of engineering. But has not eroded highest end. Otherwise all the LLM companies wouldn’t pay for talent, they’d just use their own LLM.

I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value. You won’t see it right away which is probably where this sentiment is coming from, but it will absolutely catch up to you. Elegant code isn’t just for looks. It’s code that can still adapt weeks, months, years after it has shipped and created “business value”.

It's a trade-off. The gnarly thing is that you're trading immediate benefits for higher maintenance costs and decreased reliability over time, which makes it a tempting one to keep taking. Sure, there will be negative business value, but later, and right now you can look good by landing the features quicker. It's FAFO with potentially many reporting quarters between the FA and the FO.

This trade-off predates LLMs by decades. I've been fortunate to have a good and fruitful career being the person companies hire when they're running out of road down which to kick the can, so my opinion there may not be universal, mind you.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#29

Post by helloplanets »

The writeup is a bit contrived in my opinion. And sort of misrepresenting what users can do with tools like Claude Code.

Most coding assistant tools are flexible to applying these kinds of workflows, and these sorts of workflows are even brought up in Anthropic's own examples on how to use Claude Code. Any experienced dev knows that the act of specifically writing code is a small part of creating a working program.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#30

Post by zmmmmm »

this concept of bottlenecking on code review is definitely a problem.

Either you (a) don't review the code, (b) invest more resources in review or (c) hope that AI assistance in the review process increases efficiency there enough to keep up with code production.

But if none of those work, all AI assistance does is bottleneck the process at review.

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