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AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

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Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#151

Post by ChrisLTD »

win311fwg wrote: post #39
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.

It is not so much forgetting as much as it is acceptance that when welcoming AI into a codebase, the code can no longer matter; that all that matters is that the properties of the system are validated. That isn't a change that comes free, so nobody should be expecting magic, it is a different set of tradeoffs. There is no such thing as a panacea.

How can the code no longer matter? It literally is the logic (not to mention performance, and reliability) of the software.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#152

Post by agentultra »

sarchertech wrote: post #121
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.

We had a library written by a former employee who was a prolific producer of code. He insisted we needed it and spent over a year developing it in company time. The library was a masterpiece of what if driven development. It was about 50k LoC, and it had 300k LoC of dependencies. It was a nightmare to modify. And no one wanted to take over maintenance so people would submit PRs to the former employee when they did mo…

Every line of code is a liability. A potential security breach. An error waiting to corrupt customer data. A maintenance burden.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#153

Post by skydhash »

sublinear wrote: post #133
molsongolden wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and I think the author agrees with this too. One of the ideas is that the devs should be discussing and documenting their intent outside of the code then letting AI tools generate the code as specified. "Engineering" should occupy the time that was previously occupied by "coding" and the context and writing should exist as intentional written context, not just poorly documented code.

I agree that documentation should be made higher priority than "coding", but letting AI code everything is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's from this perspective that a lot of engineers feel strong negative sentiment towards AI. There are always going to be some critical sections of code that one must consider carefully. These tend to be at the extreme ends of choice. Either there's only one way to do i…

> From the perspective of a diligent engineer trying to avoid technical debt and other incidents down the road, burning an extra couple of days to get it done right by hand isn't that big of a deal. LLMs become about as useful as a google search. Assuming one does not work at a coding sweatshop, why not just use the google AI summary 90% of the time?

If there's one thing that seems unclear from AI proponents, that is the number of technology they're using at the same time. After months or so on a project there should be enough that should be in longterm memory or resources that are part of your browser history that things that require deep research should be a small part of each ticket. And it would be important enough to get it right.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#154

Post by QuantumNoodle »

goldenarm wrote: post #150
QuantumNoodle wrote: post #147

Given how many critical systems software touches these days, I am surprised that there they are not licensed. Imagine if civil engineers can just go building shit as minimum viable products? Sure prototype quickly but someone should be found liable for final product.

relevant xkcd : https://xkcd.com/2030/

lmao excellent reference! While this is poking fun at the block chain hype a bit, a shocking amount of (good) software engs don't know good security practices. I'd be interested to hear arguments for and against being licensed to write software for particular applications (e.g J.Doe can work on this application but any auth code has to be signed off by someone licensed). AI tools are great but screwing up an implementation (for a well thought out spec) does happen, esp. in security applications and someone needs to be liable for life-ruining data breaches.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#155

Post by AStrangeMorrow »

blensor wrote: post #26
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…

Maybe the solution is to look out for the most silent engineers. Those that output less despite having the ability to create near infinite output.

Not sure how to understand that. You mean as the best engineers?

Funnily at my company, the few engineer that did the majority of the work before AI still do the majority of the work now. By majority I mean tackling both more issues and better.

However there is a general verboseness and over engineering trend across the board.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#156

Post by skydhash »

eiwiwi wrote: post #143
simonw wrote: post #75

> 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've been thinking about this a whole lot recently. So much of my int…

I’m gonna say this in the most polite way that I can but who cares? Look around you - google is valuable because it hoovers up data to generate revenue from advertising and has minimal expenditures compared with the revenues. All those bets? Lol yeah what about them? Engineering for the sake of engineering has no value to the economy - aka it’s irrelevant. It’s the hard truth nobody wants to hear. There’s a limited s…

> Engineering for the sake of engineering has no value to the economy - aka it’s irrelevant.

I would put that as my signature if HN supported that. I see a lot of systems being built where the whole point seems to be about the ritual, not anything valuable for the user.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#157

Post by golly_ned »

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've even seen AI-generated roadmap documents that promise the world, are broadcasted to director+, who sign off without a thought.

Words and code are so cheap they're meaningless, while human focus, attention, and understanding are so expensive and overloaded.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#158

Post by protocolture »

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 have a feeling that the fallout from this phase of the industry is going to be an exotic form of technical debt that is remarkable mostly in its enormity.

This.

I feel like it is going to become illegal for older engineers to retire until its all cleaned up. When the debt catches up its going to be civilisation level problem, like asbestos or lead.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#159

Post by saltcured »

gitremote wrote: post #148
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? Yes. > That doesn't sound effective that sounds like digging ditches to fill them. It sounds effective to me, like removing garbage from sidewalks so people can walk straight instead of walking around the trash. > Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added. Correct. Today I cleaned up if (a || b) return true; if (c) retu…

Written exactly like that, yours is obviously cleaner.

But, if that original code had comments and traceability of each condition and return to a specific domain scenario, you would be doing a disservice by collapsing it to the one flat boolean expression. In that case, it may be better in its expanded form, and you should let an optimizing compiler do the collapsing.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#160

Post by contravariant »

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…

You'll recognise the good engineers as the ones that remove code.
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