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Redis array: short story of a long development process

antirez.com

41–50 of 118 posts

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#41
post #25

Sharing my current MO: I start with a high level design md doc which an AI helps write. Then I ask another AI - whether the same model without the context, or another model - to critique it and spot bugs, gaps and omissions. It always finds obvious in hindsight stuff. So I ask it to summarize its findings and I paste that into the first AI and ask its opinions. We form an agreed change and make it and carry on this a…

How much faster/slower are you with that process compared to writing code yourself?

Having tried something similar, the perceived speedup does not, in the steady state, last.

To get a quality, lasting, result you're ultimately having to carefully study everything otherwise you end up quickly accumulating cognitive debt and the speedup soon shrinks as you're constantly having to revisit the initial approaches.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#43
post #5

Is it possible to see the specification file you created and used for AI assisted development? Very cool anyway! Can I expect a youtube video about this soon?

Yep I will release it, it is a bit out of sync at this point, but will do a pass of updating and will release it.

It’s always a great HN thread when an author of a widely used lib/app engages on a technical level.

antirez - you inspire a generation of devs. Thanks for all you do.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#44

The use of C stdlib localization functions (toupper, mbrtowc, etc), makes me suspect if there will be some regex behavior differences between systems or locales.

Redis sets the locale at startup to avoid issues so should be ok but we will document that for instance è will not match È when nocase is used.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#45
post #30

Sharing my current MO: I start with a high level design md doc which an AI helps write. Then I ask another AI - whether the same model without the context, or another model - to critique it and spot bugs, gaps and omissions. It always finds obvious in hindsight stuff. So I ask it to summarize its findings and I paste that into the first AI and ask its opinions. We form an agreed change and make it and carry on this a…

The discourse around AI is that we’ve unlocked a whole new unsupervised paradigm of development; but you’re basically describing how Google has built code for a decade, just with humans of different levels of trust instead of AI. And I’m not saying that to poke fun at you (my workflow is essentially identical to yours), or at Google, but rather to say that there’s nothing new :) AI is a fantastic accelerator of effec…

That is actually reassuring. I used to try to work this way with people but the culture where I work didn’t align and I found it easier to work this way alone by trying to put myself into critique mode and so on. Now much better to get AIs to do it. And I find the more I polish the plan the less expensive the AI needed to implement too.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#46
Couldn't some of the use cases presented for this be accomplished with ZSETs? I get the performance angle, but it seems that this could have been accomplished without the new API surface by selectively optimizing ZSET storage for dense values (in the same way that Arrays selectively use sparse representations).

The RE component is interesting, but as commentary here has noted it seems orthogonal to the array data structure (i.e., usable on others as well). Does this not make more sense to accomplish with Lua scripting? Or if performance of Lua is an issue perhaps abstracting OP to be composable on top of any command that returns a range of values.

I say this with reverence for Antirez as the expert in this space, but some of this new feature set feels like the sort of solution that I tend to see arise from LLM-driven development; namely creation of new functionality instead of enhancement of existing, plus overcomplicating features when composition with others might be more effective.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#47
Reviewing 22,000 lines of code, even from antirez, with this complex of a feature set and minimal PR description sounds like a nightmare. One starts to see why major open-source software like Postgres tends to be developed on a mailing list, with intermediate design decisions discussed by the community, separate patches for different related features, incremental review, and then a spaced release cadence.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#48
post #24
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, I need to turn off content blockers for the article content to load.

I should probably remove the Adsense JS which I don't use anyway...

Oh shoot. Sorry I didn't even think about having a content blocker running on my phone. Sorry for the distraction.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#50

Let's make it very clear - this is the original creator of redis, or one of them. He is not "your avg dev" and it took him 4 months with llm. This is not a seal of approval for you to go and command all your developers to move to Claude code/codex/any other ai coding tool fully. I'm looking at you - any avg CEO of a startup.

>He is not "your avg dev" and it took him 4 months with llm.

He's not, but his work is obviously not average.

Average dev work is plumbing and CRUDs.

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