101–110 of 184 posts
Even 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…
If we rephrased this to "When I reject my coworkers code even if it works" and give the same reasons there would be zero dissent. There is this weird idea that seems to come up with AI that any solution must be good and adequate. Software Engineering is all about rejecting code that works for the right code that works.
If you reject AI code that works then your mindset is still too hands on. Put another way - you still have some loops to work on taking yourself out of. The agent should’ve delivered code that was acceptable as a first pass. Agents respond really well to feedback! They have no ego and they’ll happily improve code if told where and how. But you need to provide the tools that provide that feedback without your involvem…
Frankly, if that's truly your flow, then you cannot possibly know if the code really does what you expect it to do. "TDD" isn't some magic trick. The tests codify the expected behavior. But if you don't review them for correctness, if you let the LLM build them blindly, then you have no idea what those tests assert and can make no claims about whether the code then does what you expect. That's fine. That's your choic…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
Sometimes the human is faster.
I've seen someone duplicate a class file (already filled with duplicate methods) rather than subclassing, and when called out on this it was because properties were private.
This was a team with just me and him in it, it didn't even really benefit from things being private.
That said, the really important lesson I've learned over the years is that terrible code and practices are almost irrelevant: this app won awards and was highly regarded.
Titles like these make me always point out the obvious: A working state is the absolute minimum requirement for any code to be merged, isn't it? ...imagine to merge something even though you know that's not working. Besides, this post has nothing specific to code produced by an LLM, and placing AI in the stated reasons feels completely arbitrary, or is rather a fallacy of our times: - I reject [AI] code when I can’t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file Why is this worse than splitting it across 1k files?
Does taking this example and extending it to the limit answer your question? There is a reason we don’t have a single file called program with a million lines of code in it. Google studies on module size vs code defect rates for more empirical numbers.
(Personally my threshold is around 2-5 thousand lines per file depending on what it is; but that's me working solo, obviously I'll follow whatever standards any team I'm in gives me).
"Even if it works?" How do you verify that it works?
Human developer can work on a program incrementally, ensuring at each step that it is mostly correct.
But LLMs can't think, they fake reasoning and explore problem space in random walk until they stumble into something that looks like a solution. And these "solutions" will have hilarious and absolutely unexpected failure modes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In the discrete world of computing, there is no meaningful metric in which "small" changes and "small" effects go hand in hand, and there never will be." - E.W.Dijkstra (EWD1036)
I believe grandparent meant "small enough changes that you can understand what the effects are likely to be"
My position is that AI could be useful to find the potential places for these changes, but it should be someone who's capable of thinking to implement them.
Even 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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#%22Gell-Mann_...
Earlier 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've seen countless vibecoded implementations that look exactly like that. Especially painful is agents adding the same utility functions in each and every file instead of properly reusing or splitting things.
And then I have to fix them.