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I'm going back to writing code by hand

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

#291

Post by lukan »

pron wrote: post #264
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…

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 chan…

How do you define "bad code"?

If I instruct the AI to make small modules where I can verify they work, have tests and no side effects - then it is good enough code for me. It works, is readable and can be extended - and will turn into bad code if this is not done with care.

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

#292

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

mountainriver wrote: post #265
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What problems are they? I can't really think of any problems where writing the code was the hard part.

There's plenty of times where I don't know what code to write because I've never used a library before. But it's just a page of documentation away. It's not hard, it's just slow and tedious.

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

#293

Post by bluGill »

djeastm wrote: post #275

When it was Copilot tab-completing lines, people would say, "yea, but you still have to make sure you're the one writing the whole functions". Then when it was completing functions, people would say, "yeah, but you still have to make sure you're the one writing the logic around the functions" Then when it was completing the logic around the functions, people would say, "yeah, but you still have to make sure you're th…

The models can do architecture. However they typically (at least currently) do a really bad job until you force them. I use AI all the time, it is getting better, but I still review every single line. Individual lines are no today are not better than tab completion of last year - sometimes really good and save my typing, sometimes really really bad.

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

#294

Post by wavemode »

thunky wrote: post #230
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…

> You look at the code again and there is so much code spaghetti is an understatement it’s the Chinese wall. I don't understand this. A large codebase should be a collection of small codebases, just like a large city is a collection of small cities. There is a map and you zoom into your local area and work within that scope. You don't need to know every detail of NYC to get a cup of coffee. Its your responsibility to…

To use your analogy - there's a big difference between the streets of New York and the streets of Boston. In New York if you know you're on 96th and 3rd, then you automatically know how to get to 101st and 5th - it's just a grid. But not every town is like that - many require you to possess knowledge about specific streets and specific landmarks in order to navigate anywhere.

To speak more directly - every codebase has local reasoning and global reasoning. When looking at a single piece of code that's well-isolated, you can fully understand its behavior "locally" without knowing anything about any other part of the code. But when a piece of code is tightly coupled to many other parts of the codebase, you have to reason globally - you have to understand the whole system to even understand what that one piece of code is doing, because it has tendrils touching the whole system. That's typically what we call spaghetti code.

If you leave an AI to its own devices, it will happily "punch holes", and create shortcuts, through your architecture to implement a specific feature, not caring about what that does to the comprehensibility of the system.

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

#295

Post by daishi55 »

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 generated code is more than fine, it’s good in many cases. And I read it :)

Indeed for the task of “jump into an unfamiliar codebase and make a requested change that aligns with existing styles and patterns, and uses existing functionality” I would say something like opus 4.7 exceeds the capabilities of most developers.

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

#299

Post by embedding-shape »

bluGill wrote: post #293
djeastm wrote: post #275

When it was Copilot tab-completing lines, people would say, "yea, but you still have to make sure you're the one writing the whole functions". Then when it was completing functions, people would say, "yeah, but you still have to make sure you're the one writing the logic around the functions" Then when it was completing the logic around the functions, people would say, "yeah, but you still have to make sure you're th…

The models can do architecture. However they typically (at least currently) do a really bad job until you force them. I use AI all the time, it is getting better, but I still review every single line. Individual lines are no today are not better than tab completion of last year - sometimes really good and save my typing, sometimes really really bad.

Anyone who understands the motivation, reasoning and goals can do the architecture. The crux is that hardly anyone actually understand those and even less is aligned on those, that's when misalignment happen over time, LLMs or not.

Considering how fast we can poop out code now, I think this issue is just more visible than before, but it's been an issue for as long as I've been a developer. Almost no one knows what they actually want, and half the job is trying to coax out what they want to be able to do, so you can properly architect it.

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

#300

Post by agentultra »

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 invariant, stated informally, would be hard to prove is broken by a human reviewer in the loop. Spoken language isn’t precise enough for the task.

Even if you could state it in a precise formal language the LLM under the agent doesn’t have the capability to understand what the invariant is for and why it’s important. You’ll still get oddly generated code. You might get an LLM that can associate certain tokens with those in the formal language specification which can hold invariants and perhaps even write the proofs… but you’ll still get a whole bunch of other code generated from the informal parts of the prompt.

I agree that simply adding constraints and prompts to you skills and specs isn’t going to prevent these things. Worse, that even if you could invent a better mouse trap the creature will still escape.

The problem is… “elongation:” the addition of code for the sake of the prompt/task/etc. Often less is better. This takes a human with the ability to anticipate what other humans would want/expect. When you need a generator, they’re great but it’s a firehouse that whose use should be restrained a little more.

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