Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm going back to writing code by hand

blog.k10s.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 656 posts

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

#391

Post by ex-aws-dude »

spicyusername wrote: post #233

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.

That’s what I found too

I have to periodically get it to do a bunch of refactoring

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

#392

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> A large codebase should be a collection of small codebases, just like a large city is a collection of small cities.

Oh, great analogy there.

Just like there's almost nothing in common between a large city and a collection of small cities, a large codebase is completely different from a collection of small codebases too.

Mostly because of the same kinds of effects.

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

#393

Post by Rapzid »

simon84 wrote: post #153

Personally, i've taken a serious step back from 'unsupervised' vibe-coding. When the codebase is clean and you want some additional fix or small feature, Claude is quite good at mimicking your style and does a pretty good job. When asking for a new major feature, despite hard guidelines and context (that eat half your context window), then it quickly ships bloat. The foundations are not very well organized and this i…

And it can quickly start spiraling out of control. The bloated implementations keep adding more and more context it needs for the next change. Discovery results start getting worse, implementations get worse, and bloat continues to increase.

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

#394

Post by sevenzero »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #386
sevenzero wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder why? Because I like to save time?

Avoiding abstractions "because I like to save time" doesn't sound like something a professional software engineer should ever say

Yea because having 200 different abstractions and DSLs makes stuff easier for sure! Why not use all the stuff that was popular 6 years ago like Prisma, GraphQL and Redux, whoops suddenly you need a whole team of devs knowing all kinds of unecessary abstractions.

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

#395

Post by bicepjai »

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…

This is the rule I have settled on and I can feel why. Writing the first buggy working version with agents is always fun. Then making the software reliable with the agents, the way you want is very painful.

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

#397

Post by [deleted] »

linuxftw wrote: post #388
hatefulmoron wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plan mode improves results, but it doesn't solve the underlying problems. Pretty often Claude Opus 4.7 on xhigh will formulate a reasonable enough plan, churn for a while, then come back with a summary that it didn't stick to the plan because it wasn't accurate. Worse, the disclaimer is buried under a bunch of "did X, did Y on line Z of file a/b/c", as if it's just a minor inconvenience. To the extent the plan was in…

You have to review the plan and fill in any missing gaps or correct anything that's wrong. Plan mode often isn't one shot, it might take a few iterations, but once the plan is nailed down, the results are usually very good.

[deleted]

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

#398

Post by pron »

noelsusman wrote: post #390
pron wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with both statements, but that doesn't change the problem I stated. If an agent produces reasonable code 80-90% of the time, and 10-20% of the time it makes mistakes that could render the codebase irretrievably unevolvable once they accumulate, the only thing you can do is to carefully review the agent's output 100% of the time. That it gets things right 80% of the time as opposed to 40% of the time doesn't c…

I guess I don't understand how this logic doesn't apply to human developers.

Human developers don't produce code at such a rate, and their judgment is, on average, better. So one, the review doesn't make you feel like you're slowing things down much, and two, the problems are less hidden.

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

#399

Post by abalashov »

black_knight wrote: post #288
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually what I do. I'm extremely picky about the code and force the LLM to rewrite it 1000x times until it is basically exactly what I want. You might be wondering what is the point when it would be faster for me to just write the code myself? I have ADHD and for whatever reason telling the LLM what to do instead of doing it myself bypasses the task avoidance patterns and/or focus problems I tend to suffer f…

I have used LLMs a couple of times to get started on something. I don’t have ADHD, so this is not a regular occurrence for me. But when I have tried this, I have always found the LLM solution so horrible that it instantly inspired me to do it myself. So, in that sense it worked, I got unstuck, but no LLM garbage makes it into the project.

It's nice to know I'm not alone in this. I have definitely used slop as inspiration by negative example.

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

#400

Post by indoordin0saur »

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…

Write your code by hand, but AI still serves as something of a stack overflow and code completion tool. Also good for writing tedious things like regex or little one-off utility scripts as well as a first crack at unit tests. Using it to actually write big blocks of important code is a no-no in my opinion as it produces what I would characterize as slop, even if it technically works.
Post reply on HN