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AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

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Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#161

Post by tracerbulletx »

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 been thinking about the manga Blame! a lot recently, where the entire story takes place in a run away machine built mega structure that is larger than at least the solar system.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#162

Post by Sivart13 »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #146

"...never fix a running thing. Replace it. AI pushes this premise beyond infrastructure and into application code itself. When rewriting is cheap, editing in place becomes risky. Mutation accumulates entropy. Replacement resets it." I've always found verifying some code works correctly much harder and time consuming than writing code. Replacing big chunks code means much _more_ verification and validation. When you s…

This is the major part of her argument I didn't understand.

As I see it, the "infra as code" transition means going from more ad-hoc changes to less. Predictable, auditable.

Using LLMs to replace mostly-working code with a new, nondeterministically different version seems entirely different to me. You've identified a problem in the code, great, let's rewrite it from spec. Now it fixed the problem! But did it introduce more problems? Hope you used enough tokens, I guess!

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#163

Post by zmmmmm »

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.

Now you get not just the 5 LoC to review but a 5 page essay to read in the form an auto-generated review as well. Which makes the submitter even more indignant when you start nit picking things about how it's implemented.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#164

Post by deadbabe »

protocolture wrote: post #158
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.

[flagged]

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#165

Post by rienbdj »

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.

> all that matters is that the properties of the system are validated

I don’t think this is possible in practice without leaning on the stability of the code base.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#166

Post by blindhippo »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #130
dakiol wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"High performers". Can't believe we have normalized this vocabulary, among us, "hackers".

Most of us work for business and on teams where performance matters.

Dunno about you but I work for a "business" (large company, you've heard of it) and the concept of "High Performer" is synonymous with "best politician". Sure, a lot of theater goes into things, especially dances around "data points", but at the end of the day the top tier goes to the fortunate sons.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#167

Post by [deleted] »

boomlinde wrote: post #126
kazinator wrote: post #104

Wrong! AI demands more of your hours cranking out the same discipline, due to the volume of stuff that needs to be verified. Normally the term "more discipline" is understood as increased rigor, not simply more work at the same level of rigor.

Chatbots enable unskilled developers to go in way out of their depth with little resistance. This creates problems of a new nature, not just more problems of the same nature as before. Previously in my career, a junior making a mistake and being told why it was a mistake would learn from that and improve. The junior-chatbot duo will not. The junior will feed my comment into the chatbot, and the chatbot will superfici…

[deleted]

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#168

Post by protocolture »

deadbabe wrote: post #164
protocolture wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

[flagged]

>Illegal? Get fucked. They will retire and you can deal with the mess, you have AI.

Considering the balance of my job is cleaning up technical debt, that's my own retirement I am worried about.

>When you can no longer pay off technical debt, you turn to technical bankruptcy: start over from scratch, greenfield.

What that looks like in say, 2030, I can only guess. We saw this happen to a multinational shipping company due to cryptolocker, but I dont know if theres going to be any interest in replicating that. Certainly the AI barking in the ear of the CEO isnt going to recommend it.

>I predict what will happen is eventually the number of technical bankruptcies will rise

Outside of industries required for national security maybe.

> there will be some new movement to only build codebases that fit within human heads, no AI required.

I suspect that rational governments are probably going to require No AI clauses in their tenders, but that we will also get hundreds of high profile "Whoops we used AI in this contract when we shouldn't" scandals that come to nothing.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#169

Post by kazinator »

boomlinde wrote: post #126
kazinator wrote: post #104

Wrong! AI demands more of your hours cranking out the same discipline, due to the volume of stuff that needs to be verified. Normally the term "more discipline" is understood as increased rigor, not simply more work at the same level of rigor.

Chatbots enable unskilled developers to go in way out of their depth with little resistance. This creates problems of a new nature, not just more problems of the same nature as before. Previously in my career, a junior making a mistake and being told why it was a mistake would learn from that and improve. The junior-chatbot duo will not. The junior will feed my comment into the chatbot, and the chatbot will superfici…

I understand that unskilled people are creating problems for themselves and others; but that doesn't interest me. I interpret everything from the point of view of the AI being used by skilled people.

Such as the claim "AI demands more engineering discipline, not less" ... of skilled people, not irrelevant unskilled people.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#170

Post by zmmmmm »

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

I think that's the adventure we're on now. If recreating something is low cost, what is the value in investing in designing it well in the first place? We can empirically discover issues and the the AI to address them.

I certainly routinely find in supervising what the LLM is writing that it's making terrible internal design choices and correct them. Usually things one level up from code. "This will cache every image on the client and cause a huge amount of bloat. Change it to pull the image in real time from the server" kind of stuff. You do slowly build that up in the project documentation - "Never store unnecessary data on the client: we assume they are using low powered devices without substantial storage". But it takes time and the road to discovering that empirically is through a lot of unhappy users.

So I think there is still a lot of room for genuine engineering - that is, at the technical design level. Levels up from that - code structure etc - are much less clear. I am guessing that over time we will heavily optimise code written by AI for maintenance by AI. Which may be mostly about matching the context window to the code module size. Factoring something to 5 modules may be less of a good idea if it means the context window has to hold all of them for the LLM to work. But that is the path of discovery we are on which history tells us is a 20 year journey.

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