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AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

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Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#181

Post by edot »

Elzair wrote: post #85
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 bei…

George E.P. Box for anyone wondering. So true. “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. True of any abstraction unless you’re doing everything at the quantum level, but even then … are you sure you’ve captured all the details? But then … does it matter? As long as your model is sufficient to do the thing you need to do, it’s useful enough. Don’t make it any more complicated.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#182

Post by win311fwg »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #151
win311fwg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might say in the same way that machine code stopped mattering when programming languages gained in popularity. Almost nobody will ever review machine code. I anticipate 90% of all programmers today wouldn't even know how. The move again is towards a higher level of abstraction; this time validation. Instead of describing how the program is to function, you define the properties of the system and let the fancy compiler figure out what the code should look like. If that means something that a human would call spaghetti, oh well.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#183

Post by bluefirebrand »

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…

> When it does a good job, it's usually cribbing so heavily from existing solutions by humans you could have copied it yourself if you knew where it got it from. The LLM is automating copypasta, not deliberate coding

I've been saying this a lot lately. I agree completely. Most of the impressive stuff I see people talking about AI, they could have just copied and pasted from open source repos in the past

I think that was sort of a taboo in the past though, for several reasons. First off, most teams I've worked on were reluctant to take on the additional maintenance of unvetted open source code if there were other options. For some reason this reluctance has flown completely out the window with AI, even though the cost of code maintenance hasn't really decreased.

Secondly, there was always the question of code licenses when copying from an open source repo. Companies were reluctant to risk anything that could be viewed as code theft

Now the code theft part is solved by training LLMs instead of just copying and pasting, which just feels like theft with extra steps to me

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#184

Post by roncesvalles »

mplanchard wrote: post #174
roncesvalles wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I don’t know. I mean, I agree with you overall, but it seems like tons of engineers, especially here on HN, have been more than willing to go all-in on AI for at least the past year, with many dire warnings of “coding is a solved problem,” “if you’re not programming swarms of agents, you’re going to be left behind,” and so on. This has not been my experience with my fellow engineers IRL on average, but I do feel like…

A lot of people who write code aren't professional SWEs. A lot of professional SWEs especially on Blind aren't typical SWEs at typical companies. A lot of people who claim to write code are lying. I mean would you take Gary Tan as a valid datapoint for how effective AI is at professional SWE coding? I wouldn't. But these are the kind of people who shill it the most on HN.

Also, I suspect that a lot of HN comments that generally state that AI has been useful for their work are actually not referring to programming work, but it's very easy to default interpret it that way. For example, I just recently saw a comment stating how AI can do 90% of their senior-level job, and when I looked into the guy's profile, he was actually a designer, which makes sense. But on first read I assumed the comment was referring to writing code.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#185

Post by bluefirebrand »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #137
amatheus wrote: post #120

I liked the article overall but found it a little wishy-washy in some of the conclusions. > People do not want to wake up every day and log in to Slack and find the buttons and menus all subtly moved around. People do not want financial transactions that complete most of the time. Determinism is not going anywhere, my friends. Well, I can't reconcile people not wanting things moving around and determinism with the pr…

Plus humans are non-deterministic, so AI replacing humans is not adding more determinism to the development process.

Humans make up for being non-deterministic by being disciplined

AI doesn't have anything resembling discipline

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#186

Post by boomlinde »

kazinator wrote: post #169
boomlinde wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unskilled people are not irrelevant if you intend on working with other people, in which case you will need to deal with them in one way or another.

I will probably be dealing with them in the future more than in the past because chatbots bypass the process by which unskilled people generally become skilled people.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#187

Post by Arthurian »

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…

The under-performers and coasters just don’t read their code, in my experience thus far it’s been pretty transparent. PRs aren’t a perfect gate, but they’re one of the only ones we have right now, and it’s pretty clear who’s putting in the effort and who isn’t.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#188

Post by 4lx87 »

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…

Right, and do you spend so much of your time doing that your net LoC is negative? If that's the case it implies people are writing code only for other programmers to clean it up. Programmers solving a problem created by programmers. That's dysfunctional. Effective engineering as I see it would be putting the processes in place to prevent having to constantly rewrite code.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#189

Post by beezlewax »

Arthurian wrote: post #187
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…

The under-performers and coasters just don’t read their code, in my experience thus far it’s been pretty transparent. PRs aren’t a perfect gate, but they’re one of the only ones we have right now, and it’s pretty clear who’s putting in the effort and who isn’t.

How is it clear though? It can be really hard to tell.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#190

Post by jplusequalt »

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…

>People get VERY upset (and condescending) any time you suggest that being able to produce lines of code faster is a valuable thing.

I think some people care about understanding things they have to attach their names to. Many obviously don't care, but others do.

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