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The Coming Loop

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: The Coming Loop

#111

Post by quincepie »

galoisscobi wrote: post #41

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhaust…

I have given up on spending more time reviewing PRs and help fixing bad decisions made by AI because all it does is encouraging the same thing without learning. Next PR will most likely contain similar design / code problems.

I can't speak for all orgs but at the end of the day, the only metric that my org cares about is how AI is improving our work. Holding the line for quality is definitely a good thing, but when your org doesn't care about the pressure on PR reviewers, and the effort it took to fix those PR mistakes or their repeat, those reviews are only helping the loop case and that AI is without flaws. I am not saying AI is a bad thing all together, but when the org ignores those metrics, I am only contributing and helping to prove that the other side is right.

Re: The Coming Loop

#112

Post by [deleted] »

crymeth0t wrote: post #84
ramon156 wrote: post #4

Quoting the creator of CC holds little value in my opinion. I too call my product good. > opting out of this fully machine-driven future may not be an option. I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race. I completely agree with the conclusion of this blog post, by the way. I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I think OP did a really good job on capturing at least my curr…

> I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race. Same. I'm currently trying to find _my next thing_ and all anyone wants to talk about is how I'm using AI and it's absolutely maddening. It's become a lazy, lossy proxy for productivity. I've had a few intros for the types of orchestration engineering roles which are described in this post and they're just completely unappealing -- especially the presc…

[deleted]

Re: The Coming Loop

#113

Post by handoflixue »

mmillin wrote: post #49

>Yet even with a lot of manual steering, that type of code does not come out of LLMs naturally, and even if the code comes out naturally like that, they will still attempt to handle now impossible errors. This is something I’ve struggled to fight against in many PR reviews. Especially once already written, convincing someone that their excessive null checking is harmful is an uphill battle. Short of better modeling (…

How impossible are we talking?

I tend to be a fairly defensive programmer - maybe nothing currently sends this function a negative value, but how hard is it for a future code change to alter that assumption? I always figured a clear error was best. It lets even someone unfamiliar with the code know what assumptions are being made about the valid range of inputs, so they don't have to consider impossible outliers.

Re: The Coming Loop

#114

Post by yanis_t »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #72
yanis_t wrote: post #23

I keep thinking about at which point I should not force myself into the loop. As a developer I really like working on the code structure, making it clearer, thinking about good abstraction, breaking into modules, etc. I really take pleasure in it. At the same time I understand that at some point I am becoming the limiting factor. If the point of the software is benefit people, should I still care about how the code l…

You will always be able to ask the agent to do refactors for you - and it can do mega ones that exhaust you to think about!

Two problems: I will not get my pleasure, and I will still not know how the code works.

Re: The Coming Loop

#115

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

skepticATX wrote: post #53
galoisscobi wrote: post #41

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhaust…

Yes, I am exhausted. Most of my company is obsessed with agents, because everyone wants to be seen as AI first. There is little thought going into usage. No care for long term maintainability and quality. Our product is actively worse by many metrics, but no one cares because we marketing can say “agents”. The sad part is that this technology is incredible. It’s us choosing to turn it into a slop cannon (and the labs…

This too shall pass.

The journey was as important as the destination if not more because it gave confidence in oneself, it made us grow. I mean to suggest, coding for the sake of coding

"I wish to code for myself, nothing else": (I had written this somewhere else on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609962

If I may ask you and others, I assume that you are at a relatively decent position within your company and have somewhat say in it. Why aren't employees more honest about AI and concerns regarding it? I'd imagine that people must chalk it up as saying that there is push from investor side into using AI and management is forcing it but couldn't more effort be also redirected towards the fact that agents are still finnicky sometimes and that the sustainability of projects moving forward is going to be a major issue to investors given that they want sustainable growth.

It is my opinion that there's more hidden power in engineers that even we fail to realize and instead some of us like you are wanting to leave the industry, what a sad tail of tragic events, when the tech behind AI is good and could be helpful but oh holy, we are butchering it up so badly in some/so many regards perhaps even under the influence of AI companies and their messaging surrounding it.

Re: The Coming Loop

#116

Post by piva00 »

skepticATX wrote: post #53
galoisscobi wrote: post #41

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhaust…

Yes, I am exhausted. Most of my company is obsessed with agents, because everyone wants to be seen as AI first. There is little thought going into usage. No care for long term maintainability and quality. Our product is actively worse by many metrics, but no one cares because we marketing can say “agents”. The sad part is that this technology is incredible. It’s us choosing to turn it into a slop cannon (and the labs…

Same here, I think the tool is fantastic, it has helped me in lots of way professionally and for hobby projects involving skills I'm not experienced with but I'm absolutely exhausted.

The worst part is that I'm not exhausted from my work, I've been through a heavy burnout before and had to adapt my ways of working to not fall into that kind of exhaustion again. This is different, it's not a pressure to deliver anything specifically, no stupid deadlines, it's so much more vague than any other kind of work pressure I've been through in the past 20+ years that it makes it much harder to find ways to keep my head straight.

It's exhausting to be reviewing boatloads of PRs of very varied quality. I have relegated myself to block merges at the first sign of a bad/weird design instead of trying to understand why it might have needed a compromise in the design, many times people couldn't even explain to me why something was written the way it was... After many "it was Claude that decided this way" it became so tiring that I don't even ask anymore, I just leave a comment on the first blocker I find and reject the PR. If people are not putting any effort to review it before throwing it at me I will just return the favour.

Re: The Coming Loop

#117

Post by Multicomp »

Code is part of a shared and built understanding of an information system.

If these loopers mean we all have to move at this continuous wave of software happening, then we get to the highest levels of logical information system design and its all human judgement and balancing of business requirements to fit a given niche in a company or market. So all the programmers have to become business analysts/market researchers/businessmen...except the specific niches where AI tooling can't really clank well...or the end of the subsidized AI token era makes all this looping too expensive to continue. This feels like expert systems and symbolics lisps machines redux, where we briefly ran into the fact that its not so much the code itself not being able to do stuff, it's that your company's org always gets shipped, so if you can't change your company org, your software only has so much flexibility.

Dataflow diagrams and domain knowledge / domain modeling / ubiquitous languages may become the metalanguage that we start to use and set the standards for quality, functional, and non-functional standards and conventions. We make the "looper clankers" ensure that they fulfill that data / behavior / performance contracts before saying what "done" is, because "done" is no longer just code that compiles, code that builds, code that deploys, or even code that sits in production; it's code that fulfills all of the user requirements, operator requirements, and maintainer requirements. So, the language used may be required to make us all turn into business analysts and software architects more than syntax knowers. The revenge of UML and the return of declarative / logical design / BDD triumphing?

(Typo scan by gemma4-12b but I didn't let it alter my message)

Re: The Coming Loop

#118

Post by unknownfuture »

contagiousflow wrote: post #110
unknownfuture wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being uncharitable. I don't read it as intentionally FOMO inducing. I read it as the exhausted sigh of resignation from someone who sees where the wind is blowing whether they like it or not. I see it as someone watching tech management and execs listening rapt as Boris pours the poison of AI maximalism in their ears. I read it as someone who sees developers around them either drinking from that same poisoned…

"the industry" is not some monolith, and treating it as such is no productive. There are all types of software and many ways in which it is created. If the companies that are "AI enabled" are so much better we should see some big changes soon. But I'm still waiting for products I use from "AI enabled" companies to start churning out features at unprecedented speed.

So then what's your experience in your current place of work?

Re: The Coming Loop

#119

Post by bob1029 »

galoisscobi wrote: post #41

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhaust…

> We have two camps of people at work

I don't like the framing of this, but I suppose it's inevitable given how every other political issue has been framed to date.

There are many camps in between the two being described. There are those who use maybe $20 worth of unsubsidized tokens per month to accelerate their work. Full-time human in the loop, every LOC still reviewed by hand. Also, the developer who still does copy-paste in and out of ChatGPT. Those tribes exist too and are way more typical than these extremes.

Re: The Coming Loop

#120

Post by flir »

foobar10000 wrote: post #45
fartcoin67 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the opposite, couldn't be bothered to work on code outside of work. Barely did at work because I was more focused on wrangling a small army of shitty contractors (thanks strategic partner initiative for firing all of our small shop contractors and replacing them with morons from "offshore"). Now with LLMs I find myself doing small projects that interest me or have some utility for me outside of work, and doing a…

Agreed - there was always a set of things I wanted to do that I knew the magic core for, but wanted a team of implementers for the curft, the 100k of actual testing harnesses, hyperparameter exploration, etc.. . I now have that team of implementers. All the problems seem research-y though - optimal binary transport systems that are zero-copy and compatible with languages, fast physical simulation optimizers, etc etc.…

If money is no object, you could have it play code golf. "Make this shorter, but still pass all the tests".

This is not a serious suggestion.

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