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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

#411

Post by 9dev »

brightball wrote: post #374
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 heard a talk from a VP at NVIDIA a couple of months ago and he echoed this. Essentially their policy is "you are still fully responsible for the code you ship, whether AI helps with it or not"

Does anyone out there working with AI coding agents not have this policy?

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

#412

Post by baddash »

wccrawford wrote: post #193
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great until the "gun to your head" is your skip-level manager demanding that a feature be implemented by the end of the week, and they know you can just "generate it with AI" so that timeline is actually realistic now whereas two years ago it would have required careful planning, testing, and execution.

If the manager is unreasonable, you were always going to have a problem with them, eventually. Nothing you can do with fix this. If manage is reasonable, you can explain to them that there isn't time to check the work of the AI, and that it frequently makes obscure mistakes that need to be properly checked, and that takes time. At this point, if they still insist you just give it the AI's work, they've made a decisio…

Great point! Looks like you got some strategies for dealing with managers lol

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

#413

Post by marginalia_nu »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #368
marginalia_nu wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is and has always been immensely helpful to understand what you are doing in any context. There are some programmers who treat the job as just plumbing together what is to them completely incomprehensible black boxes, who treat the computer as a mystery machine that just does things "somehow", but these programmers will almost always be hacks that spend their entire career producing mediocre code. There are things…

That's a little simplistic and lacking in nuance. > To get beyond being a hack, you need to understand the entire stack, including the code that you didn't write, including both libraries, frameworks and the OS, and including the hardware, the networking layers, and so forth. I think maybe you overestimate your own knowledge here. It's one thing to understand general principles and design or to understand a contextua…

Well I mean I've built an internet search engine from scratch[1] and I'm making a living off this successfully enough to have completely left the wagie existence for the foreseeable future, so I think I at least kinda walk the talk.

I'm far from the best at anything and make no claims toward knowing everything, but I do think I have reasonable breadth in my experience and work, and I don't think I could have built something like this otherwise.

[1] ... which is something that does not decompose neatly into black boxes and must to a large degree be built from first principles as goddamn nothing off the shelves scales well enough to deal with multi-terabyte workloads at the even a fraction of the speed a bespoke solution can.

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

#414

Post by 9dev »

baddash wrote: post #89
jimsojim wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is a legitimate set of rules to follow for maintaining code sanity and a solid mental model of how a codebase may grow, it’s always challenging to stick to them in a workplace where expectations around delivery speed have changed drastically with the onset of AI. The sweet spot lies in striking a balance between staying connected to the codebase and not becoming a limiting factor for the team at the same t…

That's kind of what I figured, sadly. I haven't experienced it personally yet since I got let go from my last job about 14 months ago, but it makes so much sense given how management is so willing to sacrifice quality for speed.

To make a bit of a counter argument here - it's really hard to stick to 100% quality at speed 1.0, when your opponent argues for 90% at 2.5. That's the story the AI fast-movers are telling, and from a business perspective, it's hard to counter it (regardless of whether that speed increase actually materialises).

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

#415

Post by baddash »

jimsojim wrote: post #121
baddash wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of what I figured, sadly. I haven't experienced it personally yet since I got let go from my last job about 14 months ago, but it makes so much sense given how management is so willing to sacrifice quality for speed.

Another frustrating thing that has emerged from this is where managers “vibe code” half-baked ideas for a couple of hours and then hand it off as if they’ve meaningfully contributed to the implementation. Suddenly you’re expected to reverse engineer incoherent prompts, inconsistent code, and random abstractions that nobody fully understands. In their mind they’ve already done the “architectural heavy lifting” and acc…

lol I pray to the lord almighty my future managers aren't this fuckin dumb

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

#416

Post by zephen »

photochemsyn wrote: post #73
green_wheel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nondeterministic natural language compilers

Just because the trajectory is chaotic doesn't mean it’s not deterministic.

A model, given exactly the same inputs, will return exactly the same outputs.

But your prompts are not the only inputs. Among other things, there is a random seed injected by the vendor.

That is a primary source of non-determinism.

Then, of course, is the fact that you don't personally have an old copy of the model, and the vendor isn't going to keep the model forever, and there are no unit tests to make sure that, faced with prompts like you gave it before, the newer models won't suffer major regressions in the functionality you were using.

And even if there were no non-determinism, the models suffer greatly (much more so than traditional compilers) from the butterfly effect.

It is literally impossible to pin down part of your prompt in such a way that it always will contribute to good outcomes, and such that you can simply vary a tiny bit of the prompt to logically correlate with tiny variations in the output.

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

#417

Post by snickerbockers »

I like to explain my opposition to vibe coding by replacing the phrase "write code for you" to "fuck your wife for you". You could make all the same arguments that the AI could do a better a job, its never impotent, it frees you from being pressured to do it when you might be tired or not in the mood etc. But thats not the point and most people would still be opposed to sort of, err, "vibe vibrating".

I feel the same way about coding, its a source of pride for me and when I hear people say I should resign myself to being an "ideas guy" while chatgpt actually creates things I find the very concept to be distasteful regardless of whether or not it can outperform me.

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

#418

Post by linuxftw »

hatefulmoron wrote: post #401
linuxftw wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right. I think having it spawn lots of subagents, read everything, formulate a big and detailed plan, only for it to be subtly wrong while requiring me to carefully review the result and the intermediate plans that produced it is quite tiring. I suppose things slip through.

If you understand these subtle pieces you perceive the AI to get wrong, you should include that in your prompt. Also, unit test and functional test coverage go a long way to ensure correct behavior.

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

#419

Post by timacles »

mjburgess wrote: post #174
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 think this is true, but i imagine there's a workflow solution to this which isnt to drop AI. Eg., treating AI code generated as immediately legacy, with tight encapsulation boundaries, well-defined interfaces etc. And integrating in a more manual workflow. There's a range from single-shot prompts to inline code generation, that will make more sense depending on the problem and where in the code base it is. Single-s…

This is like getting a person addicted to drugs and then asking them to only use the drugs on Thursday and Friday.

This seems to me like it requires an impossible level of discipline, judgement and foresight

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

#420

Post by linuxftw »

pron wrote: post #403
linuxftw wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try plan mode. The problems you're speaking about are already solved.

They are nowhere near solved. Agents make serious mistakes in judgment and do it frequently enough to threaten the viability of the codebase unless you slow down and monitor them very, very closely . If you do that, it's all good. If you're not, your codebase is rotting at a superhuman speed underneath you and you have no idea until it collapses.

I agree they make mistakes in judgement, that's the whole point of plan mode. That judgement comes to the surface before lots of tokens are wasted without sight of the overall solution.

It's all very simple. "Use x library, data model should be xyz, do m, not n."

They're obviously not at the point of replacing an experienced programmer as far as knowing the start-to-finish way of accomplishing every detail, that's what the human is for.

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