Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

charitydotwtf.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 234 posts

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#81

Post by latentsea »

hootz wrote: post #40
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 they expect you to also use an LLM to review, and I bet they are doing exactly that when asked to review someone else's code.

That gets you 90% the way there. So, it it only really works if you accept the cruft and the risks associated with that last 10%. Been doing this day in a day out for the last few months and no matter how much and how good we get the automated reviews, we still can't skip the manual ones.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#82

Post by latentsea »

mooreds wrote: post #30
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…

Are there any products out there that are capturing the prompts/sessions? I imagine you could do it in an adhoc way, asking Claude to write up a summary of the session as part of the commit message. But is there anything else that's more structured/higher level?

We just have hook that runs on git push that instructs Claude to ensure the PR description is up to date. Works well enough for us.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#83

Post by z0r »

argee wrote: post #5
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.

I'm not sure this article had enough thought put into it. For example: What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight. I…

As soon as I read the quoted paragraph, I rapidly scrolled to see how much more was written, then closed the tab. Generating a lot of code might be 'free' now but the generated code is very costly. I don't have the time to read an article written upon such a premise.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#84

Post by hhjinks »

banannaise wrote: post #77
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.

Turning inefficient, unreadable code into efficient, readable code often results in an overall reduction in LoC. High-quality code and high-volume code are highly anti-correlated. Incidentally, low-quality code that is excessively long just so happens to be common complaint with AI-generated code.

Rewriting code to be more compact is orthogonal to productivity.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#85

Post by Elzair »

Elzair wrote: post #76

I read the article, and it seems she is forgetting the aphorism "all models are wrong". This is a common mistake that people who like "realistic" "simulation" RPGs often make. Any suitably comprehensive model of a thing is just the thing itself. To have a model of a location that includes all the detail of the actual location, you would need a 1:1 scale model, which is just a copy of the location. Any plan (i.e. prom…

However the second part of that aphorism is "but some are useful". I have often wondered how much of IT/Programming is just sticking well understood pieces together. I remember 8 years ago wondering why we could not replace LLVM with a much simpler system that replaced all the manual optimization with a simple AI "optimizer" trained to transform simple compiled code into "optimized" code. I remember the consensus being that the AI system could likely not produce correct code reliably enough to be used. If AI cannot replace such "low level" code, then surely "high level" problems are widely out of reach. Yet people use it for "high level" problems. What gives? My hypothesis is that a lot of modern digital engineering is "plug and play".

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#86

Post by skydhash »

jasonlotito wrote: post #51
budsniffer952 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in other words, all the "awesome engineers" can't really tell good code from bad unless it's really obvious? Why should we listen to you about AI code being crap, then? Maybe, in the end, you don't really know. Maybe AI is better at it than you?

No. Your AI tool that summarized the comment did you dirty. The key here was this: > perfect formatting and at least superficial plausibility Basically, a library full of books that have nice covers is going to take time to see that all those books are just filled with ipsum lorem. Before, they coudln't stand up a fake library. The issue comes down to time and effort.

> Basically, a library full of books that have nice covers is going to take time to see that all those books are just filled with ipsum lorem

Worse if it’s a mixture of good content and ipsum lorem.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#87

Post by roncesvalles »

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…

>This is mostly due to incredible pressure from the C-level for every engineer to be using as much AI as possible

I think this is an important point. Software engineers always had the right instincts on how to approach AI for coding -- cautiously. Execs got too coked up on LinkedIn puff pieces from nobodies and adver-prophesizing CEOs selling their tokens and chips that they forced something unnatural upon their orgs.

Now what we see in the software dev space is incredible levels of malicious compliance ("you want slop, I'll give you slop").

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#88

Post by ihsw »

strix_varius wrote: post #42
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…

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.

[dead]

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#89

Post by ecshafer »

strix_varius wrote: post #42
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…

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.

I really can't agree with this. Sure pure LoC is a bad metric. But there is a correlation between output and LoC. Outside of a very senior developer, maybe a Principal or Lead that is spending all day in architecture meetings and reviewing PRs, most high performers are also outputting code.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#90

Post by scubbo »

romaniv wrote: post #37
wbl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old model couldn't do math, the new one solved a big open problem.

"Open AI claims that its model disproven an Erdős conjecture, therefore my crappy way of arguing about software quality is valid." I really don't know how I'm supposed to reply to stuff like this.

> Open AI claims

You undermine your own point when you misrepresent the situation like this. Real human mathematicians, including at least one Fields Medal winner, have validated and complimented the result.

Post reply on HN