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Writing code is cheap now

simonwillison.net

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Re: Writing code is cheap now

#221

Post by mixologic »

cpursley wrote: post #207
bfbf wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, it’s even more effort to get good code with an agent-when writing by hand, I fully understand the rationale for each line I write. With ai, I have to assess every clause and think about why it’s there. Even when code reviewing juniors, there’s a level of trust that they had a reason for including each line (assuming they’re not using ai too for a moment); that’s not at all my experience with Codex.…

Throw your next bug at this: https://skills.sh/obra/superpowers/systematic-debugging

I find it amazing that skills are essentially excellent tools for humans to understand too.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#222

Post by wiseowise »

locknitpicker wrote: post #197
scuff3d wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but there were a lot less ditch diggers in the world after the invention of the backhoe

> Yeah but there were a lot less ditch diggers in the world after the invention of the backhoe As a specialization? Sure. But the ditch diggers moved since to machine operators, handymen and the like. In the past there were sysadmins. Do we have less software engineers since sysadmins ceased to be a thing?

> As a specialization? Sure. But the ditch diggers moved since to machine operators, handymen and the like.

All of them? What if they liked digging ditches?

> In the past there were sysadmins. Do we have less software engineers since sysadmins ceased to be a thing?

Software Engineers were never sysadmins in the past, you’re thinking DevOps maybe?

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#223

Post by djb_hackernews »

dirkc wrote: post #220

I like using the analogy of 'living in a small apartment' when building systems with a small team. You need to choose carefully what furniture you can fit into your apartment, and that choice depends a lot on how you live your live. Do you want a large table to host friends, or a comfortable couch to fall asleep on in front of the TV? If you get both the space will probably be cluttered. The same applies to a small s…

Are you familiar with the cathedral vs the bazaar?

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#224

Post by g_b »

arkh wrote: post #203

Every modern (and not so modern) software development method hinge on one thing: requirements are not known and even if known they'll change over time. From this you get the goal of "good" code which is "easy to change code". Do current LLM based agents generate code which is easy to change? My gut feeling is a no at the moment. Until they do I'd argue code generated from agents is only good for prototypes. Once you…

> Do current LLM based agents generate code which is easy to change?

They do. I am no longer writing code, everything I commit is 100% generated using an agent.

And it produces code depending on the code already in my code-base and based on my instructions, which tell it about clean-code, good-practices.

If you don't get maintainable code from an LLM it's for this reason: Garbage in, garbage out.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#226

Post by theshrike79 »

LtWorf wrote: post #174
beagle3 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most non-hobby project, the cost of code was in breaking a working system (whether by a bona fide bug, or a change in some unspecified implicit assumption). That made changes to code incredibly expensive - often much more than the original implementation. It sounds harsh, but over the lifetime of a project, 10-lines/person/day is often a high estimate of the number of lines produced. It’s not because humans type…

> if the constraints and tests are reasonably well specified. if they are, then why would a human be so slow? You're not comparing the same situation.

Because humans need to type with a keyboard, then click around with a mouse.

In that time the LLM has made a change, ran tests, committed, pushed, checked that the CI build failed, looked at the CI logs, fixed the issue and the PR is now passing.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#227

Post by wiseowise »

duggan wrote: post #191
qudat wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when there’s a service outage and you cannot debug code without an agent?

Like any service outage out of their control, people will find other things to do until it’s over.

Afternoon latte and useless meetings won’t do themselves!

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#229

Post by pjerem »

locknitpicker wrote: post #196
orange_puff wrote: post #186

I basically fully agree with this. I am not sure how to handle the ramifications of this in my day to day work yet. But at least one habit I have been forming is sometimes I find that even though the cost of writing code is immensely cheap, reviewing and validating that it works in certain code bases (like the millions of line mono repo I work in at my job) is extremely high. I try to think through, and improve, our…

> I find that even though the cost of writing code is immensely cheap, reviewing and validating that it works in certain code bases (like the millions of line mono repo I work in at my job) is extremely high. That is my observation as well. Churning code is easy, but making sure the code is not total crap is a completely new challenge and concern. It's not like prior to LLMs code reviews didn't required work. Far fro…

What tremendously helps is asking the LLM to add a lot a lot explanations by adding comments to each and every line or function.

You can remove those comments afterwards if you feel they are too much but it helps a lot the reviewing.

More a trick than a silver bullet but it's nice.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#230

Post by alexhans »

gormen wrote: post #143

The cost of code never lived in the typing — it lived in the intent, the constraints, and the reasoning that shaped it. LLMs make the typing cheap, but they don’t make the reasoning cheap. So the economics shift, but the bottleneck doesn’t disappear.

It doesn't disappear but it does easy up some instances of fighting configuration, documentation, syntax or even comparing three approaches that are similar but you don't know their full effect.

I think it's a very fun space, finally being able to empower many people who in the past wouidve been bottlenecked unless they were using very simple tools for their domain and upskilled enough. Those 2 things will still be true, but the speed at which some things can happen at the exploration and other layers has seen a significant speedup.

Other problems like entropy/slop, security, system testing, lack of automation fundamentals arise but it's a good problem to start tackling.

I'm very focused on evals [1] because is what allows me to not to be the bottleneck with economists who I want to empower to code end to end and I'd like that mental shift to happen for anyone becoming a builder so non traditional developers and developers by trade have a common language for product building [2]. That part of speaking to different audiences and combating hype that promises to do everything for you Vs the intent that's actually needed is hard, but trying gets you to advance quite a lot.

[1] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/measure-first-...

[2] https://ai-evals.io

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