Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
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Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
1–10 of 123 posts
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#2I've seen a lot of people talking about how AI is making codebases worse. I reject that, people are making codebases worse by not being intentional about how their AI writes code.
This is my take on how to not write slop.
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#3I've seen a lot of people talking about how AI is making codebases worse. I reject that, people are making codebases worse by not being intentional about how their AI writes code. This is my take on how to not write slop.
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Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#4I've seen a lot of people talking about how AI is making codebases worse. I reject that, people are making codebases worse by not being intentional about how their AI writes code. This is my take on how to not write slop.
The intention part is right but the bottleneck is review. AI is really good at turning your clean semantic functions into pragmatic ones without you noticing. You ask for a feature, it slips a side effect into something that was pure, tests still pass. By the time you catch it you've got three more PRs built on top.
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#5[flagged]
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#6I've seen a lot of people talking about how AI is making codebases worse. I reject that, people are making codebases worse by not being intentional about how their AI writes code. This is my take on how to not write slop.
Agreed. When you submit code you must take responsibility for its quality. Blaming AI for low quality code is like blaming hammers for giant holes in the drywall. If you don't know how to use AI tools without confidence that your code is high quality, you need to re-assess how you use those tools. I'm not saying AI tools are bad. They're great. But the prevalence of people pushing the tools beyond their limits is not a failure of the tools. Vibe coding may be fun but tight-leash high-oversight AI usage is underrated in my opinion.
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#7I've seen a lot of people talking about how AI is making codebases worse. I reject that, people are making codebases worse by not being intentional about how their AI writes code. This is my take on how to not write slop.
The intention part is right but the bottleneck is review. AI is really good at turning your clean semantic functions into pragmatic ones without you noticing. You ask for a feature, it slips a side effect into something that was pure, tests still pass. By the time you catch it you've got three more PRs built on top.
In my experience trying to push the onus of filtering out slop onto reviewers is both ineffective and unfair to the reviewer. When you submit code for review you are saying "I believe to the best of my ability that this code is high quality and adequate but it's best to have another person verify that." If the AI has done things without you noticing, you haven't reviewed its output well enough yet and shouldn't be submitting it to another person yet.
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#8I've seen a lot of people talking about how AI is making codebases worse. I reject that, people are making codebases worse by not being intentional about how their AI writes code. This is my take on how to not write slop.
I think there’s just a lot of people who would love to push lower quality code for a variety of legitimate and illegitimate reasons (time pressure, cost, laziness, skill issues, bad management, etc). AI becomes a perfect scapegoat for lowered code quality.
And you’re completely right, humans are still the ones in control here. It’s entirely possible to use AI without lowering your standards.
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#9..but unintentional AI (aka Modern Chaos Monkey) is so much more fun!
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#10[flagged]
I haven't really extensively evaluated this, but my instinct is to really aggressively trim any 'instructions' files. I try to keep mine at a mid-double-digit linecount and leave out anything that's not critically important. You should also be skeptical of any instructions that basically boil down to "please follow this guideline that's generally accepted to be best practice" - most current models are probably already aware - stick to things that are unique to your project, or value decisions that aren't universally agreed upon.