431–440 of 656 posts
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dude... I need to break free from the wagie existence too. any advice? besides the points you've made already :P
Build something people want. Tired point, but it really is true. People will throw money at you if you do.
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Juniors learn. Some juniors are potential good seniors. Over time they will internalise good architecture and be able to make good judgments on their own. Micromanaging LLMs is like having Dory from Finding Nemo as your colleague. You find ways to communicate, but there is no learning going on.
LLMs can learn, just not the same way that juniors do. When an LLM does something wrong you can always update it's rules or skills to not make that mistake again. Or you can utilize a subagent whose sole purpose is to review code to prevent that mistake. Lots of ways you can improve LLMs over time. Of course if you don't provide that feedback loop, no learning happens. I guess the same could be said of a junior, thou…
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Sounds like you're just fine depending on an extremely imprecise abstraction (natural language) and an extremely opaque third party (anthropic).
I think you're missing the point of the commenter. A third party library is a new dependency. Since there's new vulnerabilities almost every week in the npm ecosystem, if you can do something without a third party, it's probably better. With LLM driven code you can generate code once, and then if anything is shitty about it you can always manually update it yourself without the need of an LLM. It's a dependency of co…
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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.
Sure, if you carefully review the agent's output, including tests, you can get good results. If you don't carefully review the output, you obviously have no idea if it's good enough for you. The only way to find out is that 30 changes down the line the agent won't be able to change one thing without breaking another, but by then the codebase will be too far gone to fix.
Some of these checks have caught thousands of the same error, even with the latest Opus 4.7 writing the original code.
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The concept of a small module is an architecture invariant. You’re making that decision, not the LLM. And you’ve made that decision because the machine is not good at certain things. You’re doing that because you can’t trust the LLM to make that decision on its own.
I’m doing it because as a DDD adherent, I’ve been building software that way for 15 years without GenAI and now with GenAI I can do it faster. You can’t play whack-a-mole with GenAI. You have to start from well-known principles and watch everything it produces. Every module or bounded context has to have its own invariants. You can’t fully automate software engineering with GenAI. It seems the vast majority of GenAI…
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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?
Every project should have a custom linter for their tech stack. It would check for not just syntax errors, but architectural choices as well as taste guidelines.
Whenever the LLM writes bad code, I add it to my linter to check against in the future.
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So, basically you need to micro-manage it. Where are your 10x gains now? And is it fun to work like that?
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…
But the difference with LLMs currently - I guess? - is that non-engineers are pushing the idea that it’s universally indispensable at scale. I think it leads to a lot of emotion bleeding into the debate.
We should go back to designing UML diagrams for programs before we write them /s
For example, if I'm new to programming today and I'm not part of any community that necessarily approves agentic coding or disapproves of vibe coding and I heard that C programs run fast as heck and I heard that I can automate jobs 1,2 and 3 with such a program, I generate said program and it works as expected per my limited experience then what's the issue?
Perhaps in a couple of weeks I notice I'm missing 1/4 of my HD space and I figure out probably via an agent that my cool C program is creating bloat through caching or creating hidden dot files, so I agentically/vibe-ally generate a patch. Maybe this encourages me to join a community of other amateurs or a pro-am community where I learn specifics - eg. the exact bug(s) in my code -- as well as metas -- eg. testing.
There will probably be millions and millions of people generating code for their own purposes thanks to LLMs, and the number grows as the technology develops and becomes more trivial. So I wonder how much value there is in the "how to think about this" discussion vs the "how to use this" discussion. It almost feels like religious encampments are forming over a false -- possibly manufactured -- lines of division