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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#101

Post by zozbot234 »

csallen wrote: post #55
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

I'll take the other side of this. Professional software engineers like many of us have a big blind spot when it comes to AI coding, and that's a fixation on code quality. It makes sense to focus on code quality. We're not wrong. After all, we've spent our entire careers in the code. Bad code quality slows us down and makes things slow/insecure/unreliable/etc for end users. However, code quality is becoming less and l…

However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding

It actually becomes more and more relevant. AI constantly needs to reread its own code and fit it into its limited context, in order to take it as a reference for writing out new stuff. This means that every single code smell, and every instance of needless code bloat, actually becomes a grievous hazard to further progress. Arguably, you should in fact be quite obsessed about refactoring and cleaning up what the AI has come up with, even more so than if you were coding purely for humans.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#102

Post by FpUser »

I do not have anything resembling problems described. Before I ask AI to create new code (except super trivial things). I first split application into smaller functional modules. I then design structure of the code down to main classes and methods and their interaction. Also try to keep scope small. Then AI just fills out the actual code. I have no problems reviewing it. Sometimes I discover some issues - like using arrays instead of maps leading to performance issues but it is easily spotted.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#103

Post by bytefish »

This resonates with my experience.

I have several Open Source projects and wanted to refactor them for a decade. A week ago I sat down with Google Gemini and completely refactored three of my libraries. It has been an amazing experience.

What’s a game changer for me is the feedback loop. I can quickly validate or invalidate ideas, and land at an API I would enjoy to use.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#104

Post by camdenreslink »

yojo wrote: post #36
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

+1 I’ve been driving Claude as my primary coding interface the last three months at my job. Other than a different domain, I feel like I could have written this exact article. The project I’m on started as a vibe-coded prototype that quickly got promoted to a production service we sell. I’ve had to build the mental model after the fact, while refactoring and ripping out large chunks of nonsense or dead code. But the…

I’ve found that LLMs will frequently do extremely silly things that no person would do to make typescript code pass the typechecker.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#105

Post by te_chris »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

Without wanting to sound rude: I think the mistake people make with AI prototypes is keeping the code at all.

The AI’s are more than capable of producing a mountain of docs from which to rebuild, sanely. They’re really not that capable - without a lot of human pain - of making a shit codebase good.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#106

Post by zephen »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #100
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

For me it’s just a matter of “does this actually save me time at all?” If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead? How much money have I wasted in tokens?

> does this actually save me time at all?

Soooooo....

As one who hasn't taken the plunge yet -- I'm basically retired, but have a couple of projects I might want to use AI for -- "time" is not always fungible with, or a good proxy for, either "effort" or "motivation"

> How much money have I wasted in tokens?

This, of course, may be a legitimate concern.

> If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead?

This likewise may be a legitimate concern, but sometimes the motivation for cleaning up a basically working piece of code is easier to find that the motivation for staring at a blank screen and trying to write that first function.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#107

Post by camdenreslink »

csallen wrote: post #76
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy this at all. Code quality will always matter. Context is king with LLMs, and when you fill that context up with thousands of lines of spaghetti, the LLM will (and does) perform worse. Garbage in, garbage out, that's still the truth from my experience. Spaghetti code is still spaghetti code. Something that should be a small change ends up touching multiple parts of the codebase. Not only does this increase…

I didn't say that you "want" spaghetti code or that spaghetti code is good. I said that (a) apps are getting simpler and smaller in scope and so their code quality matters less, and (b) AI is getting better at writing good code.

Apps are getting bigger and more ambitious in scope as developers try to take advantage of any boost in production LLMs provide them.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#108

Post by slfnflctd »

csallen wrote: post #84
mnsc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. In 2020 people predicted that Facebook Horizon would only go one direction, always improve and become as pervasive as the internet. So when you predict that the design and architecture capabilities of models will continue to improve, thus making code quality irrelevant, you sound very confident. And if in five years you are right, you will brag about it here. If not, well I for one…

You're confusing betting on a company/product vs betting on technological improvement in general. It is absolutely the case that virtual reality technology will only get better over time. Maybe it'll take 5, or 10, or 20, or 40 years, but it's almost a certainty that we'll eventually see better AR/VR tech in the future than we have in the past. Would you bet against that? You'd be crazy to imo.

There's a kid outside the window of the place I'm staying who's been in the yard playing and talking with people online through his VR headset for like 2+ hours. He's living in the future. Whatever happens, he and his friends are going to continue to be interested in more of this.

Whether what they're using in 20 years is produced by the company formerly known as Facebook or not is a whole different question.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#110

Post by moshib »

> There’s an uncomfortable parallel between using AI coding tools and playing slot machines28. You send a prompt, wait, and either get something great or something useless. I found myself up late at night wanting to do “just one more prompt,” constantly trying AI just to see what would happen even when I knew it probably wouldn’t work. The sunk cost fallacy kicked in too: I’d keep at it even in tasks it was clearly ill-suited for, telling myself “maybe if I phrase it differently this time.”

Oof, this hit very close to home. My workplace recently got, as a special promotion, unlimited access to a coding agents with free access to all the frontier models, for a limited period of time. I find it extremely hard to end my workday when I get into the "one more prompt" mindset, easily clocking 12-hour workdays without noticing.

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