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Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

codingwithjesse.com

271–280 of 401 posts

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#271
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shameless plug - I've been working on a general repo linting tool alint [0], which helps keep a repo cleanly structured and hygienic - essentially a linter for everything in a repo that a language-specific linter doesn't cover. It also has some considerations for integrating/playing nicely with agentic coding [1]. This started as a replacement to a bunch of scripts I had in repos that did similar things - but more cohesive, readable and much faster.

[0] https://github.com/asamarts/alint

[1] https://alint.org/agent-friendly-linter/

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#272
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure what I'm going to link to in my professional life, it's all private repos. We have a large microservice architecture in AWS. We've made major changes and the LLMs have helped every step of the way. Migrated our whole auth system from being regional, resulting in customers being limited to specific regions or managing their multiple accounts across regions, to a global authentication with data residency built into accounts so that they login to what looks like a global app now. No more uk.example.com, eu.example.com, ca.example.com and us.example.com. It's now just example.com, but data residency (and currently data processing too, but that's another thing we're working on) stays the same. This isn't some small app, this is the main product at a company with nearly a Billion in ARR.

For personal projects, only one thing could I actually show - vaicayo.com

This app was originally started pre-llm. I just wanted a centralized place for my wife and I to organize our vacations. I built out the basic crud for that a long time ago and we used it, but then llms got popular. I first integrated it into the app, now I could get it to generate vacation plans completely with the llm. It did okay.

Somewhere between 3-6 months after building out llm features claude code released or I became aware of it enough to start using it.

I rebuilt the whole thing. So what was once a spring boot app running in AWS ECS with alb + cloudfront (and yeah, some sqs+lambda python processes, s3 buckets for storage, aurora rds for db) is now a super lean apigw + lambda + dynamodb stack with a svelte frontend. I went from paying $20ish a month to $0. I also built a flutter app for android and ios that utilizes the same backend as the frontend webapp with feature parity. It's not really a production app, but it could handle it fine, it's completely cloud native and hands off to operate. And let me be clear about the rebuild, it's not a 1 for 1, I think all that I kept was the domain model.

For features, it's mostly just a crud app. You plan your vacation in it. Outside of that there's the ability to take pictures with the phone app that auto-sync (there's a bit of complexity here, the phone app only syncs pics when it's on wifi unless you change settings to allow syncing on cell network, images are cached locally with a ttl, uploads will run in the background and queue up, uploaded images automatically resize/compress and generate thumbnails from an s3 event lambda). The other more complex item is email ingestion, when I get a reservation email I forward it to the app and it automatically processes it (the only place I use an LLM in the app right now). If it can't discern what the email is or which vacation it goes to it goes in a travel inbox so the user can route it to the right vacation and object type. Oh I guess the paywall is a little complex. I don't advertise this thing but I have left user registration open if anybody ever wanted to use it. I did lock the email parsing behind a paywall and I limit photo uploads for free accounts.

So frontend, backend apis, flutter app for android and ios all built 100% by llm.

For code quality, the frontend is okay, the backend is pretty clean but could use some things split out into domains, and the flutter app has some work to do (recently found a couple code smells). But there's no issues adding features, shipping, etc. I literally finished adding some of the photo syncing features in the flutter app last night.

Other than that, I have created 5+ other personal projects that I wouldn't have without an LLM. I've made 2 godot games, a private scribbl.io clone with a few extra features that myself and my coworrkers play as a "happy hour" on fridays, tons of ci/cd build stuff and terraform (using my own personal modules, so I guess that's not 100% llm coded if you consider the modules), and then a couple other simple apps.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#273
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no such thing as technical debt in the age of AI. Producing new technical debt quickly doesn't mean there's no more technical debt.

Never mind the huge, untouched, unspoken-of debt to all the people whose work--literary, artistic, software--under various licenses, or without, it (rather THEY, the owners and co-conspirators) are taking and re-using, without attribution, without credit, nor payment of any form. Not even a thanks (because as soon as that is acknowledged it will enter the consciousness and then the question of injustice will dwell--a…

[flagged]

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#274

> 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…

Physical industries are very different than software. Leather shoes are made many times, 1x per customer. Code is created once, using the same product for all customers. This gives a lot more leverage on investing in a quality product.

I also don't agree that software is disposable for the same problem. If it's a temporary problem sure, the code is thrown away and we create something new when another, different problem comes up that can be solves with software.

But if it's an enduring problem? The code sticks around.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#275

> 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…

Thought experiment: would a junior developer armed with a modern day gpt-5.5 or opus 4.8 in 2015 would have been considered a 10x developer (assuming nobody knew they were using AI)?

No. I experienced this firsthand. Brought on a on level dev who was using Ai. Created slop, when asked how it works, he just said “it’s all in the documentation” Lots of good documentation, but that’s bot what I needed. I needed an engineer that understood and knew what he created. I’m no longer at that org.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#276

> 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?

Great programmers learn all documents are high latency state-machines.

A "Report" is just a document feature projection.

People may initially think this is in err, then think again... =3

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#278
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, v1 is sloppy, then I tell the LLM to clean it up. Every 1 prompt of building tends to require 1-5 prompts of clean up. Simple, fast, clean good code. The chasm between "Software Developer" and "Software Engineer" is getting wider. Articles like this and the comments under it give away who is an Engineer and who is just a coder.

> Every 1 prompt of building tends to require 1-5 prompts of clean up. Simple, fast, clean good code. I have found this to be very effective as well. However, it's so easy to do, I can't imagine they won't build it in. The harnesses will improve and the loop of "self-review, judge what needs clean up, do the refactoring, repeat until clean" will get included in the one-shot. They are already doing this somewhat, they…

They have definitely built some of it in.

And yes, right now you still need the architectural and system design knowledge because the LLM will fuck that up. We'll all find out if that continues being needed in the future. From what I understand about LLMs and how they work, I doubt it, but also, yeah, I doubted it would've gotten this far when I think back 2+ years ago.

Also, maybe I should be clear, I pretty much never one-shot things. My sessions with claude or other cli tools always starts with a bit of a conversation until we converge on a good plan, claude builds the code, we discuss some more, then we iterate.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#279
post #6

Please write a manual on how to cleanup after AI rockstar managers who think they can code. Much needed right now as I slept only two hours since yesterday after solving a SEV-0 and having to wake up after a 2 hour nap, so I could be now cleaning up the fallout before business hours. I am not a AI-denier, I am actually thankful I have AI right now to multiply my force, but frankly, people STILL need to review that fu…

> Please write a manual on how to cleanup after AI rockstar managers who think they can code. Why are you allowing AI rockstar managers to (I assume) push without code review? Why are you cleaning up the fallout? It's not AI issue, it's people issue

The code is AI reviewed, and I was ordered to change repo setting so a single AI review is enough. I've tried suggesting a lot of things, but it is not on my paygrade to allow or disallow something, only recommend.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#280
Its never been quicker or cheaper to build something with bad foundational assumptions and principles. Its never been easier to add features whilst not recognizing that it comes with added responsibility. And it will never be too late to hire me for your V2 migration project.
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