What if it's not _my_ codebase?
Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
41–50 of 123 posts
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
this always starts out right but over the years the code changes and its documentation seldom does, even on the best of teams. the amount of code documentation that I have seen that is just plain wrong (it was right at some point) far outnumbers the amount of code documentation that was actually in-sync with the code. 30 years in the industry so large sample size. now I prefer no code documentation in general
Are there any good systems that somehow enforce consistency between documentation and code? Maybe the problem is fundamentally ill-posed.
I am not saying it doesn't matter because it does, but how much does it matter now since we can get documentation on the fly?
I started working on something today I hadn't touched in a couple years. I asked for a summary of code structure, choices I made, why I made them, required inputs and expected outputs. Of course it wasn't perfect, but it was a very fast way to get back up to speed. Faster than picking through my old code to re-familiarize myself for sure.
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#43What changed for me isn’t that AI writes bad code by default, but that it lowers the friction to adding code faster than the team can properly absorb it. The dangerous part is not obvious bugs, it’s subtle erosion of consistency.
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#44My 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.
I see this a lot in research as well, unfortunately including myself. I do miss college where I would hand write a few thousand lines of code in a month, but i’m just so much more productive now.
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#45The concepts of Semantic Functions and Pragmatic Functions seem to be analogous to a Functional Core and Imperative shell (FCIS):
https://testing.googleblog.com/2025/10/simplify-your-code-fu...
The key insight of FCIS is that complicated logic with large dependencies leads to a large test suite that runs slowly. The solution is to isolate the complicated logic in the functional core. Test that separately from the simpler, more sequential tests of the imperative shell.
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#46My 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.
I don't think it will go away, I think there will remain a niche for code where we care about precision. Maybe that niche will get smaller over time, but I think it will be a hold out for quite a while. A loose analogy I've found myself using of late is comparing it to bespoke vs off the shelf suits.
For instance, two things I'm currently working on: - A reasonably complicated indie game project I've been doing solo for four years. - A basic web API exposing data from a legacy database for work.
I can see how the API could be developed mostly by agents - it's a pretty cookie cutter affair and my main value in the equation is just my knowledge of the legacy database in question.
But for the game... man, there's a lot of stuff in there that's very particular when it comes to performance and the logic flow. An example: entities interacting with each other. You have to worry about stuff like the ordering of events within a frame, what assumptions each entity can make about the other's state, when and how they talk to each other given there's job based multi-threading, and a lot of performance constraints to boot (thousands of active entities at once). And that's just a small example from a much bigger iceberg.
I'm pretty confident that if I leaned into using agents on the game I'd spend more time re-explaining things to them than I do just writing the code myself.
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
this always starts out right but over the years the code changes and its documentation seldom does, even on the best of teams. the amount of code documentation that I have seen that is just plain wrong (it was right at some point) far outnumbers the amount of code documentation that was actually in-sync with the code. 30 years in the industry so large sample size. now I prefer no code documentation in general
Are there any good systems that somehow enforce consistency between documentation and code? Maybe the problem is fundamentally ill-posed.
Keeping the documentation in the repo (Markdown files) and using an AI coding agent to update the code seems to work quite well for keeping documentation up to date (especially if you have an AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md in the repo telling it to always make sure the documentation is up to date).
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
this always starts out right but over the years the code changes and its documentation seldom does, even on the best of teams. the amount of code documentation that I have seen that is just plain wrong (it was right at some point) far outnumbers the amount of code documentation that was actually in-sync with the code. 30 years in the industry so large sample size. now I prefer no code documentation in general
Are there any good systems that somehow enforce consistency between documentation and code? Maybe the problem is fundamentally ill-posed.
Ultimately the code is the documentation.
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#49"Every optional field is a question the rest of the codebase has to answer every time it touches that data," This is a beautiful articulation of a major pet peeve when using these coding tools. One of my first review steps is just looking for all the extra optional arguments it's added instead of designing something good.
There's nothing specific to AI about this. Humans make the same mistake.
To solve this permanently, use a linter and apply a "ratchet" in CI so that the LLM cannot use ignore comments
Re: Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this style of work will go away. I was skeptical but I now write the majority of my code through agents.
I don't think it will go away, I think there will remain a niche for code where we care about precision. Maybe that niche will get smaller over time, but I think it will be a hold out for quite a while. A loose analogy I've found myself using of late is comparing it to bespoke vs off the shelf suits. For instance, two things I'm currently working on: - A reasonably complicated indie game project I've been doing solo…
I write systems rust on the cutting edge all day. My work is building instant MicroVM sandboxes.
I was shocked recently when it helped me diagnose a musl compile issue, fork a sys package, and rebuild large parts of it in 2 hours. Would've taken me atleast 2 weeks to do it without AI.
Don't want to reveal the specific task, but it was a far out of training data problem and it was able to help me take what would've normally taken 2 weeks down to 2 hours.
Since then I've been going pretty hard at maximizing my agent usage, and tend to have a few going at most times.