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AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

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Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#61

Post by cmrdporcupine »

philbo wrote: post #33
trjordan wrote: post #27

> Those are not code problems. They are evaluation problems. > Code becomes precious when it is the only place knowledge lives. Reading AI code all day is _agonizing_. Just, a horrible way to live, and it melts people's brains at the moment you need them to be the most capable. Manual programming has this really productive and gratifying feedback loop, where you read the code, write the code, and fix it until it comp…

If a coworker dumped a 5k-line code review on you, you'd tell them to come back when it's broken down into smaller, reviewable chunks. Large dumps of code are basically unreviewable by humans, but it seems like a lot of people have forgotten about that when it comes to LLMs.

> If a coworker dumped a 5k-line code review on you, you'd tell them to come back when it's broken down into smaller, reviewable chunks.

I would, and all my training at Google told me to do that. But what I found after I left that comfortable box was that somehow this kind of practice is acceptable in the industry at large and you're expected to just Deal With It(tm). 5k lines isn't even high by what I've seen.

Worse the "code review" tools that people have access to in GitHub make this absolutely and totally unworkable to incrementally improve review. Messy merge commits full of "responding to code review" comments. Threads impossible to follow. Just bad tooling.

So a lot of shops, from what I've seen, are just yeeting it with very shallow reviews.

This is my observation pre agentic AI. LLMs just threw kerosene on that dumpster fire.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#62

Post by overfeed »

4lx87 wrote: post #55
strix_varius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure this is gated by where you work (especially by how technically savvy your manager is), but the most effective contributors at my job tend to be the ones with near-zero (or sub-zero!) net LoC. LLMs are prolific and they love to add shit. Truly capable engineers are able to achieve more business outcomes with less code / fewer moving parts.

The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add? That doesn't sound effective that sounds like digging ditches to fill them. Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.

> The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add

Perhaps they tackle non-code-editing tasks like architecture, design, mentoring and code review (think staff and principal tasks)

> Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added

Yes. This os not a failure. Code has a surprisingly short half-life.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#63

Post by SrslyJosh »

workbox wrote: post #3

I did not enjoy reading this article. The writing was fine, and each individual paragraph was fine, but the whole thing together was meandering and dare I say pointless. It was so many words and yet so little seems to have been said.

> The writing was fine, and each individual paragraph was fine, but the whole thing together was meandering and dare I say pointless. It was so many words and yet so little seems to have been said.

I bet that I know why!

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#65

Post by keybored »

> A few days back I wrote a piece called “AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy.”

Guess who the author is.

> > The enthusiasts are not wrong. We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles. That’s a real, existential threat.

It’s not imaginary. It’s real. This time it’s different. And on a higher level, the FOMO is real. It’s not imaginary. It’s even existential.

Why do they all write the same as well? It’s so emphatic.

> The tech is cool, but as a thinking, feeling, breathing human who cares about other people, it can be hard to get excited about anything that so many people are this upset about. It’s also hard to get excited about something when so many of the loudest voices are out there talking gleefully about putting everyone permanently out of work, and so many artists and writers and people from developing nations are talking openly about the impact on them.

> Hold your desire to jump in and berate me here, I beg you. Like I said, I will deal with the ethics and morality of using AI in my very next post. Be honest, your attention span is no more up for reading a 10,000-word essay than mine is up for writing one. (Can we blame AI for that too?)

More Inevitability Soothsaying. All our feelings are crashing with Existentinal Threat Reality.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#66

Post by K0balt »

This has been my position from the beginning of when agentic coding harnesses became genuinely useful.

I now do documentation driven development, and with very few exceptions I am committing code that is better written, better documented, easier to reason about and maintain, with less library overuse than I ever did as a senior lead with a smal team, and I’m doing it for 1/4 the price, at 4x the speed.

But it’s not vibe coding. Discipline is critical, as is deep systems understanding.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#68

Post by fusslo »

trjordan wrote: post #56
philbo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a coworker dumped a 5k-line code review on you, you'd tell them to come back when it's broken down into smaller, reviewable chunks. Large dumps of code are basically unreviewable by humans, but it seems like a lot of people have forgotten about that when it comes to LLMs.

I think it's worse than that. At least if I dumped 5k LoC on somebody in 2021, you knew I spent the time to write it, so it's "fair" to ask you to read it. But I didn't write it in 2026, so you shouldn't read it. I think it's less about "break it down" and more about "let's communicate at the same altitude." I wrote a (bait-titled) post about it: https://tern.sh/blog/stop-reading-prs/

113 files +22913 −2423

305 files +15075 −13110

153 files +21934 −8698

125 files +28120 −2398

43 files +11188 −63

118 files +21564 −647

These are the largest (6 of 35) in the past 30 days. added: 190079 removed: 39696 in the last 6 months

from one person.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#69

Post by j45 »

ryandvm wrote: post #24

It is now significantly harder to figure out who understands the systems and is using AI effectively and who doesn't know shit and is just slinging LLM copypasta around. Before 2025, the underperformers/coasters were at least relatively identifiable by the paucity of their contributions. Now all of the sudden every single engineer is filing PRs, code reviews, technical design documents, and every other artifact under…

AI usage perhaps will have to be monitored by AI.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#70

Post by 4lx87 »

overfeed wrote: post #62
4lx87 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add? That doesn't sound effective that sounds like digging ditches to fill them. Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.

> The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add Perhaps they tackle non-code-editing tasks like architecture, design, mentoring and code review (think staff and principal tasks) > Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added Yes. This os not a failure. Code has a surprisingly short half-life.

It’s not a failure that resources were spent writing code that was not needed?
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