If I can't explain the code without rereading the diff, I probably shouldn't merge it.
When I reject AI code even if it works
21–30 of 184 posts
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#22"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
I was just watching a video about system engineering and the following stucks:
Stakeholder needs: What people wants to get done with the product
Management needs: How to manage the spending of resources (time, money,…) to create the product
Engineering needs: What is the product
You have to balance the three. Sometimes it’s simple and easy to get right. Sometimes it’s complex enough, you’re never truly sure until the product is out in the wild.
Software is malleable and we can do easily do iterations which is not possible with hardware. But today, we have a skew towards engineering, where the whole focus is to create a solution, whatever that is. No understanding of the problem, no proper allocation of resources, just do something. Even if it is plastering over the crack for the eleventh time.
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 think this policy is probably more prescriptive than I would go with myself. I like to think of my risk tolerance first to help make that determination. For example, I use a vibecoded internal tool written in Go. I don’t even know how to write Go. Haven’t read a single line of the code. I just wanted to move from bash scripts to using cloud SDKs for performance reasons. But the internal tool is a convenience tool,…
> Here’s another example: you’re making a static website. No JavaScript, no interactivity.
Linking a huge file consuming clients’s bandwith for no reason. Embedding PII in the html source? And if setting up your own server, misconfiguring it?…
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#24[flagged]
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#25Even 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 mor…
These "You're right to push back" scenarios are scary for me. I mostly code ML implementations, and some of the errors Claude Code (CC - have only used Opus 4.7) makes are very sneaky, and if you don't have sufficient experience in the area (I see this with people entering ML and writing their implementations with CC), you wouldn't know when to question CC and will let errors or future pitfalls silently slip into your code. A recent example was when there was data leakage in a model calibration step, which it refused to see as an error, till I wrote a detailed reason, and then it agreed that there was a "subtle leakage".
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#26And again this makes me wonder, is AI really helping if this much review and rework is needed for all the code it writes?
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#27Even 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 mor…
> 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. If the "big ball of spaghetti" theory holds, where software companies who can't manage the debt stumble over themselves as they continue to add to the big ball of spaghetti code, I guess we'll see a row of companies declaring "software bankruptcy" or something in some/many months, depending on…
Coding agents have been better than the average "enterprise" programmer for a while now and nobody wants to admit it or talk about it. I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
People call coding agents bad because they don't know the asinine meaningless conventions at their particular company while they themselves write awful abstractions and brittle tightly coupled systems, but hey, at least they know how to write a for loop how their particular company likes.
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. If the "big ball of spaghetti" theory holds, where software companies who can't manage the debt stumble over themselves as they continue to add to the big ball of spaghetti code, I guess we'll see a row of companies declaring "software bankruptcy" or something in some/many months, depending on…
Coding agents have been better than the average "enterprise" programmer for a while now and nobody wants to admit it or talk about it. I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this. People call coding agents bad because they don't know the asinine meaningless conventions at their particular company wh…
> I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
And how long does it take a coding agent to output a thousand lines of code versus a human? The worst human at any company was rate limited by themselves. Those 'average enterprise' programmers aren't going away, they're the ones now spending tens of thousands on coding agents and filling your codebase with even more garbage without bothering to review an iota of it.
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#29And again this makes me wonder, is AI really helping if this much review and rework is needed for all the code it writes?
Depends on what it’s writing. There are times an LLM saves me a lot of time researching library functionality. Especially with testing frameworks. So many strange and arcane features out there beyond the basics, but not hard to understand what they do once you see the code. On that topic I should say I am careful when reviewing the actual test cases.
However if you’re highly familiar with a domain then LLMs are much less useful.
Re: When I reject AI code even if it works
#30Even 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 mor…
All Claude models are huge suck ups. The "you're absolutely right" meme is real even if that exact phrase doesn't show up as much anymore. I don't want to start a fight or anything but IME Codex has a bit more of a spine. If you point out something weird, it sometimes gives a good reason for it. Whereas Claude will always say "whoopsie you're right as always sir" even when it's me who missed something.
Right now the thing I get from Opus 4.8 is a ton of “That’s a good instinct”. Also >50% of its closing statements begin with “Clean.”