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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

#261

Post by nixon_why69 »

meetingthrower wrote: post #208
herrherrmann wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That workflow just sounds exhausting to me. Would I always need to consider how much of a blast radius my AI-generated code might have? Sounds like there’s so much extra management going into these micro decisions that it ultimately defeats the purpose of generating code altogether. I could see value in using it during the prototyping phase, but wouldn’t like to work like you described for a serious project for end u…

And you have discovered the job of managers! There has always been a lot of hate for managers. Wonder if the robots hate us just as much? (I often feel a weird guilt when I tell an agent to do something I know I am going to throw away but will serve as an interesting exploration...I know if I did that to a human they would be pissed...)

IMO the hate has always been for clueless managers, especially clueless yet demanding managers. Managing an LLM for coding is different, try being clueless and demanding and see how far you get.

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

#262

Post by hmhhashem »

larusso wrote: post #242
hmhhashem wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be interested in sharing your findings? I'm currently experimenting with LLM-generated rust and honestly think it works quite well, however I'm looking for ways to improve the "taste" of the agent.

I pushed a gist https://gist.github.com/Larusso/82c9aa8effb3031d149d3b5a1b96...

Thanks :)

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

#263

Post by dxdm »

throw101010 wrote: post #244
dxdm wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

LLMs do deliver "miracles", in certain cases, if you've experienced it and have been blown away by their output (one shot functional app from a well manufactured prompt, new feature added flawlessly on a complicated existing codebase, etc.), it can be tempting to reajust your expectations and think this will work consistently and at a much larger scale. They can assimilate 100s of thousands of tokens of context in fe…

Thanks, that makes sense.

I suppose it's difficult to account for the inconsistency of something able to perform up to standard (and fast!) at one time, but then lose the plot in subtle or not-so-subtle ways the next.

We're wired to see and treat this machine as a human and therefore are tempted to trust it as if it were a human who demonstrated proficiency. Then we're surprised when the machine fails to behave like one.

I have to say, I'm still flabbergasted by the willingness to check out completely and not even keep on top of, and a mental model of, what gets produced. But the mind is easily tempted into laziness, I presume, especially when the fun part of thinking gets outsourced, and only the less fun work of checking is left. At least that's what makes the difference for me between coding and reviewing. One is considerably more interesting than the other, much less similar than they should be, given that they both should require gaining a similar understanding of the code.

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

#264

Post by pron »

perarneng wrote: post #256
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…

If you know how to write good code you can force AI to write good code with various techniques. It's 100% doable. You just need to figure out the problems AI has and find solutions to make it easier for it. Ex: extremely small contexts Modularize to modules with clear boundaries and only allow the AI to work within those boundaries. Make modules pure from IO so they are easily testable. Hide modules behind interfaces…

That doesn't quite work, and precisely for the reason I mentioned: You can definitely tell the AI to follow some strategy, but at some point the strategy will need to change, and the AI won't tell you that (even if you tell it to). Unless you read the code every time you won't know if the AI is following the strategy and producing good results or following it and producing bad results because the strategy has to change. This can happen even in small changes: the AI will follow the strategy even if the change proves it's wrong, and if you don't pay close attention, these mistakes pile up.

So yes, you might get good results in one round, but not over time. What does work is to carefully review the AI's output, although the review needs to be more careful than review of human-written code because the agents are very good at hiding the time bombs they leave behind.

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

#265

Post by mountainriver »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #123
snowe2010 wrote: post #34

> The other change is simpler: I'm doing the design work myself, by hand, before any code gets written. Not a vague doc. Concrete interfaces, message types, ownership rules. That’s the hard part of coding. If you have an architecture then writing the code is dead simple. If you aren’t writing the code you aren’t going to notice when you architected an API that allows nulls but then your database doesn’t. Or that it d…

Yes, I think there's 2 kinds of developer. Those who think the code is the hard part, and those that don't. The developers that thing coding is hard are the ones that absolutely love AI coding. It's changed their world because things they used to find hard are now easy. Those that think coding is easy don't have such an easy time because coding to them is all about the abstractions, the maintainability and extensibil…

There are also just problems where the code is the hard part…

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

#266

Post by topaz0 »

sevenzero wrote: post #247
spockz wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were tired of writing forms yourself, had you looked at https://jsonforms.io/ ? Just specify the the data you need, or extract it from the api spec and go. Display the form uniformly every time across your site. No need to burn AI time.

I typically avoid any most abstractions or third party dependencies. Yea it could be neat, but I still need a lot of custom logic here and there. Same reason I avoid stuff like GraphQL. A little update: upon viewing the page on phone, for me the "comitter" field in the demo is going out of bounds... Really not speaking for their product.

Sounds like you're just fine depending on an extremely imprecise abstraction (natural language) and an extremely opaque third party (anthropic).

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

#267

Post by mountainriver »

mtrovo wrote: post #239

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 covera…

This is it, people are acting like bad code wasn’t written before. My wife and I were full on laughing about it in bed the other night of all the absolutely horrible code we’ve seen written and how people actually think LLMs are worse than that.

The quality gates are up to you, and if you are smart you will make a lot of them and review them closely

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

#268

Post by hansmayer »

IdiotSavage wrote: post #260
perarneng wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know how to write good code you can force AI to write good code with various techniques. It's 100% doable. You just need to figure out the problems AI has and find solutions to make it easier for it. Ex: extremely small contexts Modularize to modules with clear boundaries and only allow the AI to work within those boundaries. Make modules pure from IO so they are easily testable. Hide modules behind interfaces…

So, basically you need to micro-manage it. Where are your 10x gains now? And is it fun to work like that?

Amen. Instead of freeing you up - AI enslaves you - and if it was even enslaving to a superior being at least!

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

#269

Post by forgotaccount3 »

IdiotSavage wrote: post #260
perarneng wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know how to write good code you can force AI to write good code with various techniques. It's 100% doable. You just need to figure out the problems AI has and find solutions to make it easier for it. Ex: extremely small contexts Modularize to modules with clear boundaries and only allow the AI to work within those boundaries. Make modules pure from IO so they are easily testable. Hide modules behind interfaces…

So, basically you need to micro-manage it. Where are your 10x gains now? And is it fun to work like that?

> you need to micro-manage it.

It is significantly easier to micro-manage an AI than a suite of junior developers. The AI doesn't replace a principal engineer, it's replacing junior and weaker senior developers who need stories broken down extremely concisely to be able to get anything done. The time it takes to break down a story such that a junior through weak senior developers can pick it up and execute it well would have the AI already done with testing built around it.

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

#270

Post by devmor »

I dismissed “AI Psychosis” as a silly term, even as a strong critic of LLMs for programming tools.

> For 7 months I'd been prompting and shipping without ever sitting down and actually reading the code Claude wrote.

But every time I read something like this, I seriously wonder about the mental state of the person that wrote it.

How do you get to this point?

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