When I reject AI code even if it works
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When I reject AI code even if it works
1–10 of 184 posts
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#2"Even if it works?"
How do you verify that it works?
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#3"Even if it works?" How do you verify that it works?
According to the author's intention, it is the code that he cannot understand or control. Even if the solution provided by the AI works, he will not adopt it. This is unless he can understand or control it. This should be an assumption.
However, if AI provides a solution, as the person using AI, one should conduct research before making a decision. This is not in conflict with or hindered by the use of the ideas provided by AI.
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#4"The reality is that code that runs and makes the CI green can still be a bad solution, and engineering has always been about implementing adequate, scalable, and extensible solutions."
Adequate often means done and cheap
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#5"The reality is that code that runs and makes the CI green can still be a bad solution, and engineering has always been about implementing adequate, scalable, and extensible solutions." Adequate often means done and cheap
Disagree, adequate means adequate. Done and cheap is what you call it when a solution is adequate. If the solution isn't adequate, it doesn't matter if it's cheap, because it isn't done.
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#6"The reality is that code that runs and makes the CI green can still be a bad solution, and engineering has always been about implementing adequate, scalable, and extensible solutions." Adequate often means done and cheap
As long as safe and stable are assumed to be base-level requirements… maybe?
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#7"Even if it works?" How do you verify that it works?
For example, the following "works":
json='{ "left":2, "right":2 }';
result="$(
perl -e '($_)=; / "left":(\d+), "right":(\d+)/; print $1 + $2, "\n";' printf '%s\n' "$(( 2 + 2 ))";Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#8"Even if it works?" How do you verify that it works?
According to the author's intention, it is the code that he cannot understand or control. Even if the solution provided by the AI works, he will not adopt it. This is unless he can understand or control it. This should be an assumption. However, if AI provides a solution, as the person using AI, one should conduct research before making a decision. This is not in conflict with or hindered by the use of the ideas prov…
I will say--as someone who has fielded late night troubleshooting calls--I totally understand OP's point of view. It's reasonable to expect that you will be able to answer questions about something that you ship, or brainstorm ways to solve a problem a customer is encountering while using something you provided them.
The obvious counterargument is "well, just ask the AI for those answers," but the AI lacks the context and experience that you have. Sometimes, genuinely, the user really is just "holding it wrong," but none of the current AI models would ever admit that, and you'd spend hours trying to solve an unsolvable problem.
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#9"The reality is that code that runs and makes the CI green can still be a bad solution, and engineering has always been about implementing adequate, scalable, and extensible solutions." Adequate often means done and cheap
> Adequate often means done and cheap
It really, REALLY depends what you're working on. If you're throwing together an internal tool or simple dashboard, it doesn't really matter what the code looks like. But if you're writing software that other programs will depend on, bad design choices ripple out and affect another generation of software. Imagine slop in the linux kernel, in google chrome, or in your compiler or runtime. Its not acceptable.
I know a lot of people spend their careers writing end user software and web UIs. AI is increasingly a good choice for this sort of code. But that's not all of us. And its not all of the software being written.
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#10Even using Fable (while it was briefly available), having it refine a plan, and directing it to make only small incremental changes, I still found reasons to reject its first pass at a lot of work. There was a lot of “You’re right to push back” responses. A lot of incidents where it would creat some giant complex set of abstractions to accomplish something that I could find ways to do much more elegantly and in a more maintainable manner.
It’s really eye opening to work with these tools on a codebase you know deeply because these problems are everywhere.
However if I opened an unfamiliar project in another language and I wanted to add a little feature with no intention of maintaining it, I’d happily accept the changes and loop until it worked well enough for my temporary needs.
The scary middle is when you’re dealing with coworkers who don’t care about anything other than closing tickets and collecting credit. With enough of a token budget you can now wrap loops around an LLM and have it try things until the program appears to work. Ask it to do a code review and then submit the PR without having understood what it was doing. There are a lot of workplaces where there isn’t a good mechanism to push back on this and the tech debt just keeps growing.