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I'm going back to writing code by hand

blog.k10s.dev

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Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#231

Post by jstummbillig »

pron wrote: post #192

Yep. The only people I've heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don't read it. The problem is that the mitigations offered in the article also don't work for long. When designing a system or a component we have ideas that form invariants. Sometimes the invariant is big, like a certain grand architecture, and sometimes it’s small, like the selection of a data structure. You can tell the agent what the…

> The only people I've heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don't read it.

Well, that is problematic. I have to either assume you are disinterested or lying and neither is great for any discourse.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#232

Post by qudat »

jwpapi wrote: post #165

That’s the same story I had. The swindle goes like this, AI on a good codebase can build a lot of features, you think it’s faster it even seems safer and more accurate on times, especially in domains you don’t know everything about. This goes in for a while whilst the codebase gets bigger and exploration takes longer and failure rate increases. You don’t want it to be true and try harder so you only stop after it pra…

Yep. I’m approaching the same problem from a different angle: writing code fast means you aren’t being thoughtful about the features you’re building. I started realizing that after I had kids and spent more time thinking about code than writing it and it really improved the quality of my work: https://bower.sh/thinking-slow-writing-fast

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#233

Post by spicyusername »

It's really very easy to spend a few hours going through a vibe-coded project by hand and having an agent fix the weird parts. If you do this often enough, you can get the best of both worlds.

Then you're right back on track.

In a way it's not that different from a human-made project. Plenty of teams have to crunch, ignoring the architecture and incurring tech debt, and then come back and fix it later.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#234

Post by jeltz »

dxdm wrote: post #183
jwpapi wrote: post #165

That’s the same story I had. The swindle goes like this, AI on a good codebase can build a lot of features, you think it’s faster it even seems safer and more accurate on times, especially in domains you don’t know everything about. This goes in for a while whilst the codebase gets bigger and exploration takes longer and failure rate increases. You don’t want it to be true and try harder so you only stop after it pra…

I find it interesting that this outcome is a surprise. I don't want this to sound smug, I'm genuinely curious what the initial expectations are and where they come from. They seem to be different for LLMs, because would anyone be surprised if they handed summary feature descriptions to some random "developer" you've ever only met online, and got back an absolute dung pile of half-broken implementation? For some reaso…

Probably same reason people expected outsourcing to the cheapest firm in India would work: wishful thinking. People wanted it to work and therefore deluded themselves.

Or really the same reason people fall for get rich quick schemes.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#235

Post by pron »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #202
pron wrote: post #192

Yep. The only people I've heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don't read it. The problem is that the mitigations offered in the article also don't work for long. When designing a system or a component we have ideas that form invariants. Sometimes the invariant is big, like a certain grand architecture, and sometimes it’s small, like the selection of a data structure. You can tell the agent what the…

And the solution is the same, as when it was outsourced- and the "patch" was fix it by writing spec. Thus i conclude my TED talk with the statement: LLMs are the new outsourcing and run into the same problems.

Not quite, because the architecture often needs to evolve when you learn more as the project evolves. People will complain when they feel the constraints drive them to unnatural workarounds, the agents don't.

You can try telling the agent to stop and ask when a constraint proves problematic, except it doesn't have as good a judgment as humans to know when that's the case. I often find myself saying, "why did you write that insane code instead of raising the alarm about a problem?" and the answer is always, "you're absolutely right; I continued when I should have stopped." Of course, you can only tell when that happens if you carefully review the code.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#236

Post by khasan222 »

I’m not very familiar with Go, however after looking at the repo I can’t help but notice there is no infra to ensure code quality. Do others see the same thing, because if so that is the real problem

Yes I agree for sure llms write terrible code when left to their own devices, but so do most engineers. Which is why we have so many tools to help keep a certain level of quality. Duplication checks, tests, linters, other engineers.

I find whenever you make an llm repo without these checks, and more, it will write like an enthusiastic junior engineer, wrong and strong. However a junior engineer would be hard pressed to get 95% coverage on a codebase, the ai is more than willing and does it in a few minutes. We can use things like this to our advantage, how many people have ever seen a repo with 100% test coverage? With ai this is very possible, with people not so much.

LLM’s writes terrible code, we know this, but when dealing with humans that write terrible code we have many techniques. We should be using those same techniques to keep the llms honest, but more importantly verifiable.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#237

Post by pron »

stingraycharles wrote: post #226
pron wrote: post #192

Yep. The only people I've heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don't read it. The problem is that the mitigations offered in the article also don't work for long. When designing a system or a component we have ideas that form invariants. Sometimes the invariant is big, like a certain grand architecture, and sometimes it’s small, like the selection of a data structure. You can tell the agent what the…

> Picking among them isn’t a matter of context. It’s a matter of judgment, and the models - not the harnesses - get this judgment wrong far too often. I would say no better than random chance. Yeah I’m currently working for several months already on a harness that wraps Claude Code and Codex etc to ensure that these types of invariants are captured and enforced (after the first few harness attempts failed), and - whi…

It's not enough to enforce the invariants because they may need to change. You need to follow the invariants when they're right, and go back and reconsider them when they prove unhelpful. Knowing which is the case requires judgment that today's models are simply incapable of (not consistently, at least).

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#238

Post by pron »

benguild wrote: post #212
pron wrote: post #192

Yep. The only people I've heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don't read it. The problem is that the mitigations offered in the article also don't work for long. When designing a system or a component we have ideas that form invariants. Sometimes the invariant is big, like a certain grand architecture, and sometimes it’s small, like the selection of a data structure. You can tell the agent what the…

“The only people I've heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don't read it.” Are you sure these people aren’t busy working rather than chatting? (haha) But in all seriousness it depends on what you’re doing with it. Writing a quick tool using an LLM is much easier than context changing to write it yourself. If you need the tool, that’s very valuable.

Sure. I'm talking about production software that needs to survive and evolve for a long while.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#239

Post by mtrovo »

Most of the issues are around code hygiene rather than just LLM code being bad. You're creating code 10x faster, but you're also writing unit tests 10x faster, not just that but integration tests, CICD workflows, prod monitoring, product and engineering documentation, etc. It was already the way to get good code quality before, nowadays I think it's just reckless to generate code that's not backed by 100% test coverage and pass all lints and static checks configured.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#240

Post by Myrmornis »

jvuygbbkuurx wrote: post #107
Myrmornis wrote: post #40

> I typed :rs pods to switch back to the pods view. Nothing rendered. The table was empty... > now something was fundamentally broken and I couldn't just prompt my way out of it. Hey I don't want to over simplify, I'm sure it was complicated, but did the author have functional tests for these broken views? As long as there are functional tests passing on the previous commit I'd have thought that claude could look at…

The problem wasn't the view didn't work. The problem was the view didn't work after something else had been done. You can't test every permutation of app usage. You actually need good architechture so you can trust your test and changes to be local with minimal side-effects.

> The problem was the view didn't work after something else had been done.

In that situation you have two choices:

1. Tell claude to iterate until the tests for the new view and the old views are all passing.

2. git reset --hard back to the previous commit at which all tests are passing and tell claude to try again, making sure not to break any tests.

It's essential to use tests when vibecoding anything non trivial. Almost certainly in a TDD style.

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