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Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

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Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#291

Post by anonymars »

akramachamarei wrote: post #161
peter_d_sherman wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

Related "income tax when I earn the money, sales tax when I spend the money, taxes on my investment returns, it never ends!"

Yes indeed, because macroeconomics is ultimately a giant circle!

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#292

Post by AndrewKemendo »

sumeno wrote: post #263
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tech…

If a neighbor leaves their dog's poop in my yard I have a problem. If someone builds an industrial scale dog poop delivery mechanism that delivers tons of dog poop to my yard every day I have a different problem even though the underlying basics are the same.

I think we’re in agreement

The problem moves from situation to structure

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#293

Post by zero_shift »

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…

Without doxxing yourself or your clients, can you share more about how this plays out?

When clients come to you, is that because they always intended to get help taking their system to production? Or is it a last resort after all the AI approaches fail?

Is there a general way that these projects break down? Or are the failures usually subtle?

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#294

Post by magicalhippo »

skydhash wrote: post #141
magicalhippo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far my take has been that there is code that isn't very important, in the sense that if it works it works, it won't be modified or extended much if at all, and it's easy to verify that it works as expected. This type of code I'm happy with letting the AI go wild on. Then there's important code, like business logic, security related stuff and such. For that I'll happily use AI to brainstorm ideas and avenues, do co…

I’ve never seen code that is unimportant. It’s either being used or not. If it’s boilerplate, it can be abstracted away. There are domains that are riskier than others (debug logging vs crypto for auth), but sometimes bugs in a somewhat safe place can lead to some catastrophic issues (you do not have to break a crypto algorithm if the key can be leaked via logging).

As I said, I think it depends on what's being made.

I've made a few internal web browser-based tools recently, and I let Codex and Claude handle the entire frontend. Don't really care about the details there.

Tool is not exposed to the internet and they had limited scope. I handled the important details on the backend myself, and I reviewed the integration tests carefully.

These tools would just simply not been made without Claude and Codex.

YMMV as they say.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#297

Post by bjertoref »

NichoPaolucci wrote: post #245
tpdly wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, even though I like 'craftsmanship' here, stakeholders don't. I think "durability" is pretty good. 'Engineering standards' perhaps. I think we'll start to see the groundwork laid for software engineering as a proper engineering field, where specific performance characteristics are required for certain stakes. Code can be like "heavy machinery", maybe needs license to operate. If an app has sensitive data in it,…

Hah. What a dream. Instead they’ll hire a team of what is essentially interns and have them deploy mass amounts of minuscule features with 0 guidance because, “hey - it’s cheap as hell and does 75% of what it’s supposed to do.” A license to operate the code, what a trip. To be frank, most other business units that are not tech or tech adjacent do not care about the code in the slightest, or the maintenance / security…

This is Indian Jugaad mentality being imported into Software Development. English equivalent is Kludge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#298

Post by brandensilva »

sdeframond wrote: post #240
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?

It is definitely the fun part to me and scaling a factory is the challenge we all decide every day we write code.

I think of AI agents as a factory unlock too.

Anything of quality needs inspection, review, and so on before you ship it. The human in the loop step is critical for value delivery.

Many software companies don't think of themselves as factories but they ship a product to a million customers and it solves a work unit of value for each customer.

Now AI agents may eventually reach a similar potential where many kinds of work can be manufactured by an agent.

The difference I think we are saying as engineers is shipping code isn't the unit of value if you want to turn a code agent into a code factory. It's just a byproduct of the value. Code is the liability, tool, or contract to delivering the value. Poor engineering results in poor output that cannot scale or poor quality that no one wants.

Without us inspecting and reviewing the output you risk the value not being delivered. Also without us, in the past you don't have a factory to begin (although vibe coding has collapsed how soon people can setup a software factory now), scaling it takes engineering effort. We build the factory and also ensure it is operating well to deliver that value to customers.

The ability for a program for loop to do a million iterations is foundational to our knowledge. AI agents just scale that up and is one of the tools we use to get there.

I'm not scared of agents making code cheap. I just see them as another tool in the arsenal to build scalable systems now. Yes some people don't need to scale and some don't need anything of quality. That's fine and is welcomed to improving people's lives. If they want to scale or need a quality factory line they come to us to deliver that still.

I think it's myopic to think this isn't coming. But it's also short sighted to assume our value is gone at building, shipping, and operating factories.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#299

Post by nrmitchi »

elictronic wrote: post #210
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 is _unfortunately_ becoming more and more "disposable"[0], in the same way other products are" Software has been the most disposable object in our lives since you could push a new build over the web. Builds change overnight, new versions every month with small updates. You have it backwards. Software has very little to no regulation compared to physical products and requires little to no effort to change. I…

> Builds change overnight, new versions every month with small updates.

Small updates are in no way throwing away the entire thing. A monthly update is not a start-from-scratch redevelopment. The old version was not disposed of in the way you are trying to imply.

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