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Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

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Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#31

Post by Cthulhu_ »

danjc wrote: post #14

As much as it's true that a novice will generally use AI to build a sloppy mess, I've also had success unsloppifying through some careful prompting.

I wish I had current-day AI (and a big credit card) for my previous job, they had a big legacy mess made by a productive but not very good developer, but my job was to rebuild it.

If I had AI tooling at the time I'd probably be more inclined to have it both refactor / optimize the existing application, add automated regression tests etc, and use it to extract all of the features and requirements for it for a potential rebuild.

But honestly I think if that application was properly designed and factored (instead of nesting JS in HTML in strings in JS or concatenating XML from query results only for it to be converted to JSON taking up 50% of response time) its lifetime could've been extended, especially if it was then containerized into a HHVM or similar php optimizer.

But, hindsight.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#32

Post by throwmeaways »

ramon156 wrote: post #7

I kind of envy people who need to clean up after others. At least you're puzzling. My current job is genuinely just boring. It's tasks that are so simple, a junior could do it. But no, instead they needed a medior. I'm not saying I'm better than this, nor that no medior will pick it up. I just cannot push myself to care about the code this company makes. It's old, dusty and it serves no one of importance. These custo…

> I just cannot push myself to care about the code this company makes.

I can very much relate.

Garbage products, by garbage companies, feeding on the laziness and tastelessness of most, as it's being capitalized by marketers.

And now, to make the matter worse - it's all being 100x by the LLMinazation of the entire field. Making code unmaintainable. And worse, making us all dumber.

I really wish we never have stumbled upon it.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#33

Post by skydhash »

robofanatic wrote: post #23

> Half the code was written in a language you didn't understand. The other half was written using libraries you never heard of. > As you waded through the slop, you browsed job postings and fantasized about leaving Just because you didn't understand something or haven't heard about a library, doesn't mean its slop. How do you make sure your definition of "clean code" is not a slop to others?

Programming is for humans first. Cleanness and code quality is judged according to that.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#34

Post by AbbeFaria »

ramon156 wrote: post #7

I kind of envy people who need to clean up after others. At least you're puzzling. My current job is genuinely just boring. It's tasks that are so simple, a junior could do it. But no, instead they needed a medior. I'm not saying I'm better than this, nor that no medior will pick it up. I just cannot push myself to care about the code this company makes. It's old, dusty and it serves no one of importance. These custo…

You are not alone. I was in this exact same position at MSFT and I put in my resignation. I am an L63 but the work I was doing, was something an L60-L61 could do and I frequently felt I was in one of those Bullshit jobs (courtesy of David Graeber). I was paid handsomely but once the sign on stock ran out, I saw that I was staying in the job just for security. I felt like one of those Hooli engineers who were sunbathing at the Hooli office terrace waiting for their stocks to vest. I am only 9 years into my career and I didn’t see that as the optimal thing for my career rn.

I didn’t have any major financial obligations like you though, so it was a much simpler decision for me.

Hang in there buddy and also thanks for the deeply human comment.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#35

Post by maerF0x0 »

I've met a handful of people across my life that i'd call truly brilliant. Like, holy heck how in the world is this person this smart? Two things I've noted about really smart people are (usually mutually exclusively) 1) Sometimes they do not realize how smart they are, because it's simple to them, or because they know the subject they assume everyone else, say with a computer science degree, knows and recalls and understands all they do. I've had friends who go off on crypto related maths and I'm like "I passed that class, but know that I do not really know the subject you just talked about" ...

And 2) There's the people who it's painfully forefront of mind that they're smarter than most everyone around them. Some of them are jerks, some of them are exhausted by being surrounded by relatively "stupid" (again, relatively...) people. For the latter group i have some sympathy. Imagine walking through life and everything is clear, obvious, easy to process and having to watch humanity make stupid choices over and over and over again when the answers have been long known...

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#37

Post by AndrewKemendo »

hilariously wrote: post #25
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #22

It’s literally no different than how to clean up old projects over the last 30 years of software engineering I don’t understand why all this stuff is all of a sudden “new.” It feels like we’ve got an entire generation of people who never had to spend their time factoring or doing hard infrastructure work It’s actually pretty baffling how rare it is to find somebody who has consistent experience in refactoring that is…

That's because the businesses got into the habit of new C level means new project, obviously the old code is bad. I even had a PE buy the company I worked at, put in a new CEO, and his goal was to rewrite the entire code base in a year. I asked him what problems this would solve and never got a straight answer besides "its yucky" and "people told me they dont like it." I have had multiple upper management teams decid…

I think that’s right

I have seen over the past decades this concept of just reusable throw it away code becomes the norm and that’s why also I’m always surprised to look at people complaining about AI development and it’s like yeah it’s just the same as all other development at this point everything‘s just frameworks and throwaway code

I’m not even mad at it but it’s just one of those things where people are like “I’ve never dealt with anything like this”

But it’s the majority of operational software engineering since more or less forever

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#38

Post by pu_pe »

danjc wrote: post #14

As much as it's true that a novice will generally use AI to build a sloppy mess, I've also had success unsloppifying through some careful prompting.

Absolutely. I really don't think the future will be humans reading and picking apart an AI-generated codebase, there will be tech debt agents or whatever running overnight.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#39

Post by [deleted] »

ramon156 wrote: post #7

I kind of envy people who need to clean up after others. At least you're puzzling. My current job is genuinely just boring. It's tasks that are so simple, a junior could do it. But no, instead they needed a medior. I'm not saying I'm better than this, nor that no medior will pick it up. I just cannot push myself to care about the code this company makes. It's old, dusty and it serves no one of importance. These custo…

[deleted]
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