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Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

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Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#231

Post by tayo42 »

hightrix wrote: post #147
rfgplk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The anti-LLM propaganda is getting ridiculous at this point. No project "needs 10GB" to compile, unless you're working with astronomically massive repos, and _no_ LLM will _ever_ generate that. Lint errors (depending on cause) are either meaningless or a result of poor pro…

Linting is also trivial for LLMs. I’d argue linting is one of the easiest and best use cases for coding assistants. This story doesn’t add up.

The person running the Ai needs to know to set up linting in the first place and have it be applied. It's not a default.

Ive had ai make code that doesn't pass a linter and make code look like hand aligned code.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#232

Post by bigstrat2003 »

Imnimo wrote: post #215

>Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. Current AI coding is certainly very lacking in the craftsmanship department. But it is not obvious to me that that will always be the case. I don't think there's some fundamental reason AI could never produce code that matches or exceeds the craftsmanship of human experts.

The fact that LLMs fundamentally do not, and cannot, have understanding or reasoning. I don't think you can produce craftsmanship through sheer volume of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#234

Post by AndrewKemendo »

sumeno wrote: post #230
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…

It's different because LLMs can generate code that immediately needs to be refactored at speeds that were unfeasible before. There was a practical limit on the amount of technical debt that could be created in a day before, now that limit is 10x or 100x higher. It can be generated far faster than it can be fixed.

Then code factoring was never the key problem was it?

It was organizational discipline

Again this is the same problem previously…organizational lack of discipline means you get some diva to build some un maintainable thing and then you have to go back and refactor it later

The problem is the same the speed is different I acknowledge but both our organizational problems and have nothing to do with writing code or technical

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#235

Post by ryandrake »

apsurd wrote: post #197
ryandrake wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things I try to teach my kid is: You are going to have to deal with the fact that there are deeply stupid people all around you, without it affecting your mental health. Those stupid people might be in a position of power over you, they might be other kids in school (or coworkers, later), they might be the president of the country, they might be your neighbor, or they might just be obstacles on the road on…

i hope you don’t actually refer to these others as “deeply stupid people” to your presumably young kids.

Of course not. I'm translating for HN

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#236

Post by habinero »

kaydub wrote: post #170
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.

Oh really? Link them.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#237

Post by sumeno »

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…

There's a difference between introducing new things because they are a well thought out appropriate choice and completely ignoring the standards of the company because you want to do resume driven development. I believe the author is talking about the latter.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#238

Post by nozzlegear »

hightrix wrote: post #147
rfgplk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The anti-LLM propaganda is getting ridiculous at this point. No project "needs 10GB" to compile, unless you're working with astronomically massive repos, and _no_ LLM will _ever_ generate that. Lint errors (depending on cause) are either meaningless or a result of poor pro…

Linting is also trivial for LLMs. I’d argue linting is one of the easiest and best use cases for coding assistants. This story doesn’t add up.

You'd have to know what a linter is and tell the LLM to set it up though, right? Or just get lucky and have it suggest setting it up/set one up without asking.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#239

Post by antfarm »

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…

Take a good look at the codebase you're working on. My guess is there's plenty opportunities to clean up after others, or even yourself.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#240

Post by sdeframond »

nrmitchi wrote: post #157

> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…

Software engineers are not artists nor shoemakers. They are factory makers.

A good analyst makes a hand-crafted, custom report in a day. A programmer makes a factory that makes thousands of reports per second for a thousand clients.

I am yet to find a factory at HomeGoods.

Now the kind of factories we make might change, but isn't it the fun part?

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