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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

#311

Post by aprilthird2021 »

herdcall wrote: post #306
raincole wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "people" in your hypothetical story have been wrong the whole time. The correct attitude is: When AI can complete lines, you still have to read and understand the code. When AI can complete whole functions, you still have to read and understand the code. When AI can complete features and tickets, you still have to read and understand the code.

I'm no longer sure you have to, actually. I mean, we do trust the assembly that compilers produce without having to read it, don't we? We're rapidly getting to that stage with LLMs, IMO.

We are not rapidly getting to that stage with LLMs and frankly it's hilarious that you are claiming so.

For anything other than Greenfield, new code projcets without dependencies and conventions and connections to other proprietary code, it has to be reviewed. Even for that case it's not good to not review code

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

#313

Post by sevenzero »

hansmayer wrote: post #282
sevenzero wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I typically avoid any most abstractions or third party dependencies Right, so depending on an LLM makes perfect sense in that case, thanks for clarifying :)

[flagged]

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

#314

Post by unlogic »

echelon wrote: post #216
20k wrote: post #151

I always find these kinds of posts interesting, to compare the velocity that people seem to get with Ai, vs what I get by just coding by hand Coincidentally I've been working on a project for about 7 months now: its a 3d MMO. Currently its playable, and people are having fun with it - it has decent (but needs work) graphics, and you can cram a few hundred people into the server easily currently. The architecture is p…

This was made in two days of vibe coding. It has flaws, but it's impressive as hell: https://tinyskies.vercel.app/ It's got a fun Zelda-inspired mechanic (I won't say which one), and you'll have to unlock abilities and parts of the world over several quests and modes to "win". It's also multiplayer.

Turning didn't work for me. Impressive as hell indeed! The author is probably already busy 100xing other projects, no time to fix such a minor nuisance.

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

#315

Post by fancythat »

20k wrote: post #151

I always find these kinds of posts interesting, to compare the velocity that people seem to get with Ai, vs what I get by just coding by hand Coincidentally I've been working on a project for about 7 months now: its a 3d MMO. Currently its playable, and people are having fun with it - it has decent (but needs work) graphics, and you can cram a few hundred people into the server easily currently. The architecture is p…

You nailed it, I came to the same conclusion recently. When people show me what have they done with LLM, I am left unimpressed as mostly they show things that can be done manually in a very short time. I also failed to observe the rise in availability of impressive software, which coincides with the fact that LLMs are currently being used to solve simple problems, instead of important ones.

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

#316

Post by throwaway173738 »

eCa wrote: post #175
KronisLV wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vouching for this comment because my friend confided in me a week ago that her manager also does this and is like “oh yeah, here’s 80% done, you just do the rest so we can ship it” when a large part of it is slop that needs to be rewritten, due to not enough guidance and pushback during generation.

That’s when you ask it to write tests to a good coverage, and then have it reimplement everything with the tests still passing…

Be careful with this because the LLM will just change the tests on you to get them to pass.

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

#317

Post by scruple »

jwpapi wrote: post #272
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…

Obviously this is all my fault and others might have a better jugdement when using it. I’m just sharing my experience compared to the promises you easily might believe reading X/HN/Anthropic. I still have a lot of usage for AI: Exploration, Double-checking me, teaching me. But writing code became very tough for me to accept. Nex-edit autocompletes mainly

> I still have a lot of usage for AI: Exploration, Double-checking me, teaching me.

I'm ready to give up on having it even review my code at this point. It's been so frustrating. It hallucinates bugs, especially in places where "best practices" are at odds with reality.

Recently it informed me of a bug where it suggested the line of code in question couldn't possibly do anything because on Linux the specific stdlib behaved in X ways, but it was obvious from the line of code that it was running on Windows which doesn't have this problem at all. Of course, it doesn't actually mention that this is an issue on Linux, just that there is a bug here. It vomits up a paragraph of $WORDS explaining why this was a high-priority bug that absolutely needed to be fixed because it was failing in subtle ways. Yet the line of code in question has been running in production, producing exactly the results it is expected to, for ~3 years.

And this is just one simple example, of the many dozens+ of times it has failed this task this year. In that same review run, the agent suggested 3 additional "bugs" or other issues that should be addressed that were all flatly wrong or subjective. I'm at a point of absolute exhaustion with this sort of shit. It's worse than a junior half of the time because of how strongly opinionated it is. And the solution to this sort of problem is an endless amount of configuration and customization that will be forgotten about by all of us over time, leading to who knows what sort of knock-on effects (especially as we migrate from one model to the next). We have a guy on our team who has ~17,000 words in his agent and instructions files, yet he sees nothing wrong with this. I guess he just really loves YAML and Markdown.

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

#318

Post by camdenreslink »

user34283 wrote: post #305
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…

I felt the same with: "it takes too much effort to get the output production ready" turning into "maybe long term the maintenance will be more expensive" I give it three months until people realize that you rarely need to review every single line and fully understand the code, like so many comments are claiming.

If you work on a product that has an existing user base that has an expectation that things will still work then you definitely still need to read the code. LLMs frequently break things or introduce subtle incompatibilities.

Maybe on projects with no users you can yolo things.

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

#320

Post by kelvinjps10 »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #222
wccrawford wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is different because it's a tool, and the user of the tool is responsible for the work performed. An outsourced developer isn't a "tool". They're a human being, and responsible for their actions. They're being paid, and they either act responsibly or they get replaced. A vibe coder is a human using a tool. The human is responsible for code quality, and if it's not good enough, they need to keep using the tool to m…

> An outsourced developer isn't a "tool". I'd think that depends on the model of responsibility at play. For example, suppose I hire a building contractor to build a house, and the electrician he subcontracts makes mistake. From my perspective, the prime contractor is equally responsible for that mistake regardless of whether he used a subcontractor, or did the work himself but used a broken tool. This doesn't make t…

But in internally it would work the same for this contractor as this subcontractor would either learn or get replaced
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