Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase

aicode.swerdlow.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 123 posts

Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase

#22

Post by benswerd »

mika-el wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Wrestled with this a bit. The struggle with this one in particular is its as much for people to read as it is for agents, and the agents are secondary in its case.

I generally agree on this as best practice today, though I think it will become irrelevant in the next 2 generations of models.

Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase

#26

Post by skydhash »

peacebeard wrote: post #7
tabwidth wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

Code review should be a transmission of ideas and helping spotting errors that can slip in due to excessive familiarity with the changes (which are often glaring to anyone other than the author).

If you're not familiar with the patch enough to answer any question about it, you shouldn't submit it for review.

Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase

#27

Post by benswerd »

abcde666777 wrote: post #25

My intentionality is that I'll never let it make the changes. I make the changes. I might make changes it suggests, but only upon review and only written with my hands.

I think this style of work will go away. I was skeptical but I now write the majority of my code through agents.

Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase

#30

Post by newAccount2025 »

peacebeard wrote: post #6
benswerd wrote: post #2

I'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…

I think this is mostly right.

In a blameless postmortem style process, you would look at not just the mistake itself but the factors influencing the mistake and how to mitigate them. E.g., doctor was tired AND the hospital demanded long hours AND the industry has normalized this.

So yes, the programmers need to hold the line AND ALSO the velocity of the tool makes it easy to get tired AND and its confidence and often-good results promote laziness or maybe folks just don’t know better AND it can thrash your context and bounce you around the code base making it hard to remember the subtleties AND on and on.

Anyway, strong agree on “dude, review better” as a key part of the answer. Also work on all this other stuff and understand the cost of VeLOciTy…

Post reply on HN