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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

#101

Post by theshrike79 »

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”.

Sometimes "elegance" just makes shit hard to read.

Write boring code[0], don't go for elegance or cool language features. Be as boring and simple as possible, repeat yourself if it makes the flow clearer than extracting an operation to a common library or function.

This is the code that "adapts" and can be fixed 3 years after the elegant coder has left for another greenfield unicorn where they can use the latest paradigms.

[0] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/on-long-term-software-deve...

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#102

Post by williamcotton »

robertlagrant wrote: post #97

> There’s a name for misalignment between business intent and codebase implementation: technical debt. I wish we'd stop redefining this term. Technical debt is a shortcut agreed upon with the business to get something out now and fix later, and the fix will cost more than the original. It is entirely in line with business intent.

Software is not a liability, it's an asset. If you make it for less then it has a shorter shelf-life. Tech debt is a nonsense term to begin with.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#103

Post by jfyi »

williamcotton wrote: post #100

> Experienced developers were 19% slower when using AI coding assistants—yet believed they were faster One paper is sure doing a lot of leg work these days...

You know, anecdotally...

When I first picked up an agentic coding assistant I was very interested in the process and paid way more attention to it than necessary.

Quickly, I caught myself treating it like a long compilation and getting up to get a coffee and had to self correct this behavior.

I wonder how much novelty of the tech and workflow plays into this number.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#104

Post by sothatsit »

bambax wrote: post #37

> Unlike their human counterparts who would and escalate a requirements gap to product when necessary, coding assistants are notorious for burying those requirement gaps within hundreds of lines of code This is the kind of argument that seems true on the surface, but isn't really. An LLM will do what you ask it to do! If you tell it to ask questions and poke holes into your requirements and not jump to code, it will…

It’s like in Anthropic’s own experiment. People who used AI to do their work for them did worse than the control group. But people who used AI to help them understand the problem, brainstorm ideas, and work on their solution did better.

The way you approach using AI matters a lot, and it is a skill that can be learned.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#105

Post by mlrtime »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #80
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…

> Or I fixed a bug in a linux scanner driver. None of these I could have done properly (within an acceptable time frame) without AI. But also none of there I could have done properly without my knowledge and experience, even with AI There are some things here that folks making statements like yours often omit and it makes me very sus about your (over)confidence. Mostly these statements talk in a business short-term r…

> 1. Are you 100% sure your code changes didn't introduce unexpected bugs?

How often have you written code and been 100% your code didn't introduce ANY bugs?

Seriously, for most of the code out there who cares? If it's in a private or even public repo, it doesn't matter.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#106

Post by frankc »

fragmede wrote: post #58
viraptor wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it doesn't refuse to write the code without first being told why it wouldn't be a better idea to do X first Then don't ask it to write code? If you ask any recent high quality model to discuss options, tradeoffs, design constraints, refine specs it will do it for you until you're sick and tired of it finding real edge cases and alternatives. Ask for just code and you'll get just code.

To be fair, they're primed to write code, even when you don't ask for it. I explicitly tell Claude "do not write code" when I don't want any, otherwise it'll spit some out just to say hello (world).

You need to be in plan mode. Not only can it not change code, its interaction with you is quite different. It will surface issues and ask you for choices.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#107

Post by mlrtime »

fragmede wrote: post #58
viraptor wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it doesn't refuse to write the code without first being told why it wouldn't be a better idea to do X first Then don't ask it to write code? If you ask any recent high quality model to discuss options, tradeoffs, design constraints, refine specs it will do it for you until you're sick and tired of it finding real edge cases and alternatives. Ask for just code and you'll get just code.

To be fair, they're primed to write code, even when you don't ask for it. I explicitly tell Claude "do not write code" when I don't want any, otherwise it'll spit some out just to say hello (world).

The more I read people saying that Claude is failing, the more I realize this is 90% a user problem. This is just an example, but I see it often.

Claude has a mode specifically for what you're talking about, it is actually very good (Opus 4.5) at planning and going through design without coding, it's called planning mode.

Listen, if you aren't constantly shift-tab or esc-esc during complex problems, and then struggling when it isn't working for you, rtfm, you'll get further and better results.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#108

Post by kranner »

ivell wrote: post #35
Quothling wrote: post #13

I think AI will fail in any organisation where the business process problems are sometimes discuvered during engineering. I use AI quite a lot, I recently had Claude upgrade one of our old services from hubspot api v1 to v3 without basically any human interaction beyond the code review. I had to ask it for two changes I think, but over all I barely got out of my regular work to get it done. I did know exactly what to…

One benefit of AI could be to build quick prototypes to discover what processes are needed for users to try out different approaches before committing to a full high quality project.

Assuming the prototypes are functional.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#109

Post by Havoc »

fpoling wrote: post #53

I have found that using Cursor to write in Rust what I previously would write as a shell or Python or jq script was rather helpful. The datasets are big and having the scripts written in the performant language to process them saves non-trivial amounts of time, like waiting just 10 minutes versus an hour. Initial code style in the scripts was rather ugly with a lot of repeated code. But with enough prompting that I r…

Same though lately discovered some rough edges in rust with LLM. Sticking a working app into a from scratch container image seems particularly problematic even if you give it the hint that it needs to static link

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#110

Post by falloutx »

bambax wrote: post #37

> Unlike their human counterparts who would and escalate a requirements gap to product when necessary, coding assistants are notorious for burying those requirement gaps within hundreds of lines of code This is the kind of argument that seems true on the surface, but isn't really. An LLM will do what you ask it to do! If you tell it to ask questions and poke holes into your requirements and not jump to code, it will…

It not just about asking questions, its about asking right questions. Can AI pushback and decline a completely stupid request? PMs & Business people dont really know the limitation of the software and almost always think adding more features is better. With AI you will be shipping 90% of the features which were never needed thus adding to bloat & making the product go off the rails quicker.
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