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Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

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Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#161

Post by akramachamarei »

peter_d_sherman wrote: post #75
anonzzzies wrote: post #19

I like fixing code made by AIs and others (outsourcing code is similar as someone else said already). Last week we found out some client tried to vibe some departmental tool; the result is some massive crap in nextjs that needs 10GB mem to compile, has 1000s of lint errors, dev logs in git (very noisy ones) and so on. Now we have to fix it: its basically free 10k-50k euros over and over again for this type of work. V…

Interesting! Yes, there's probably a market for vibe-coded software, but if there is, then there's also a market for fixing other companies' vibe-coded mistakes ... Phrased another way, you pay company A to vibe-code some software or extra software features for you, then you subsequently pay company B -- to fix company A's vibe-coded mistakes! (Hey, look on the bright side! It's more money for taxes, GDP, employment…

I'm sometimes puzzled by the way people use "circular" to describe an economic system pejoratively. (Not to suggest you are.) Seems like any worthwhile economic system is ultimately cyclical. Pulling resources into the loop is just a bonus....

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#162

Post by kaydub »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #138
freediddy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you add an agent that goes through the code and simplifies it. Before every sprint, you get the agent to simplify whatever it can without losing fidelity. It's really that simple.

"Just have a stochastic machine redo the code with no oversight" This is an utterly terrible idea.

There's always oversight, that's just something you wrongly assumed.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#163

Post by hamdingers »

kilroy123 wrote: post #153
maerF0x0 wrote: post #35

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 un…

Yup, I've known and met such people. However... NONE were "the 10x developer" who built up a huge mess. Which a team and I had to spend months and months cleaning up after.

The 10x developer believes deeply that they are #2, but they are usually incorrect.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#165

Post by giraffe_lady »

Lord_Zero wrote: post #116
eqmvii wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just getting the code to run on your laptop took a week. This one surprised me. Claude Code in the CLI has made standing up an app and debugging whatever random dependencies or docker BS a dream compared to the before times, when you'd have to learn the architecture while simultaneously troubleshooting whatever isn't working on your machine

And in the before times, you learned a lot and walked away with knowledge on the deps needed, connections, .env secrets, and cleaned it all up and documented it so the next dev would have an easier time doing it.

Bullshit I just pasted random shit from google in until it worked and then instantly forgot which combination of the 20 things I tried got it there.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#167

Post by kaydub »

erichocean wrote: post #132

> Half the code was written in a language you didn't understand. The other half was written using libraries you never heard of. The author already describes himself as "not a rockstar developer", but if this is the definition of "rockstar" I need to recalibrate. Being able to learn new languages and libraries, to me, is completely normal. (Also: how funny is it to suggest rewriting code you self-admit you can't even…

Just look at the author's accolades. They are very light.

I've never heard of this guy. He's "self employed"

The article lacks any real detail and it just a guy patting himself on the back.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#168

Post by hamdingers »

jmaw wrote: post #130
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.

Any tips on how you unsloppify things? Are you using things like claude.md/copilot.md (or similar) to guide better, do you have specific types of prompts that you run, or do you adjust your code review practices in some way to more efficiently review lots of slop code? One of my particular complaints is how code-gen LLMs tend to re-create the same code over and over again. Case in point, a use-case where a team name…

> Any tips on how you unsloppify things?

Understand what you're writing. If you never build up the mental model of what the code is doing you'll never be able to discern what is slop and what isn't. There are no shortcuts.

Piling more prompts on might get you to the same end result, but without understanding you'll never know when you're there.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#169

Post by conductr »

pjm331 wrote: post #106
conductr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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... I don’t claim to be book smart or have a high IQ or whatever but I feel this way about small things that I feel are common sense. It’s maddening to me to watch people fumble around. Or do X when obviously it will result…

i feel fairly certain everyone has some set of activities or tasks they feel this way about my wife and i have two non-overlapping sets haha you can imagine how that plays out

Same wrt my wife and I. She’s quite clumsy and to my assertion doesn’t always think things through. So it’s a bad combination for “accidents” to always happen which I think are very preventable and quite obvious to occur using her approach. A lot of it is just mental errors that I don’t make, but it’s not that I’m perfect I probably just make different mistakes (I think less volume too ;)

Yesterday she literally failed miserably at a single task. Her mission was grocery shopping. She drove to grocery store, shopped, and came home and left the groceries in the car. Didn’t realize it until she was making breakfast the next morning and there was no milk.

I see this two ways; 1) I would never make that mistake 2) I know her quite well, partners for over 20 years now, and this kind of thing is just her normal par for the course type of “oops”. The second part is what frustrates me the most, I like to learn from my mistakes and she treats it as a given that she’s just spacey/dimwit by nature and leans into everything being an “accident”. Obviously not healthy if I treat her like a child so I just watch her fumble through life and try to have a sense of humor about it all.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#170

Post by kaydub »

bogwog wrote: post #119

I realized recently that this all has an unsavory element of ego to it. It doesn't help that LLMs have basically been trained to talk like they're performing in a movie, getting creative with techno-babble that sounds both plausible and exciting. I recently had to review some slop where the LLM was using terms like "event storm" to describe how some callbacks work, or "gating-solve" to describe a simple change to an…

Funny, the element of ego I'm seeing are the devs that can't accept that LLMs write perfectly good code at a faster pace. It's always "slop" this or "vibe coded" that. Meanwhile I've personally shipped multiple apps and professionally we've done HUGE things in these past 6 months using LLM tools.
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