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Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

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Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#111

Post by estearum »

slopinthebag wrote: post #107
yoyohello13 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques don’t matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fact that you achieve the desired outcome by using the right materials and techniques. This analogy is more true than you think. This is why modern homes/appartments are trash. You can pass safety inspections us…

Yeah I agree. And you have people on this forum who gleefully point out that quality doesn’t matter to the business, as if they think they’re so intelligent because they noticed that employees are there to make the company money. Not realizing that A) it’s a very antisocial attitude and B) it’s not a tenable long term strategy.

Hang on now. GP didn't say "I care about quality" and I didn't say caring about quality is wrong.

GP said Claude's code "doesn't impress" them and that it's "crass."

Do you think a valid "long term strategy" is to create code that impresses GP and is not crass, but doesn't achieve the business outcomes it's meant to?

Inversely, do you think one can achieve business outcomes if "quality" is so abysmal that the code doesn't work or is unmaintainable?

Is it possible to write perfectly good, maintainable, performant, legible code that "doesn't impress" GP, or feels "crass" to them? Well gee, probably! Because "impressiveness" and "crassness" are literally meaningless.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#113

Post by estearum »

slopinthebag wrote: post #109
estearum wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the materials and techniques matter a lot. This is why we need to build houses with sticks and jute cord, just like we always have. It's vital also that we paint our special symbols above the door to ward off the spirits. It's insane to me that you're implying we could build houses with pre-fabricated materials or pneumatic nail guns and still somehow "have houses?" No sticks/jute cord and special symbols, then no…

The argument isn’t to not use better materials or techniques, it’s that inferior materials and techniques are fine because they don’t impact the end result, which is so obviously false when it comes to pretty much anything, but supposedly true when it comes to software.

I'm not sure who you saw arguing for inferior materials and techniques, but let me know when you find them.

What you saw in this thread was someone arguing against the dimensions of "impressiveness" and "crassness" as valid things to care about when it comes to code.

It's your mistake to assume that those are related to any meaningful concept of actual quality.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#114

Post by theahura »

dofm wrote: post #9

Blog posts like this just blow me away. > I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself. > […] > We don't really write code by hand anymore. Honestly, isn't this just influencer spam? What possible value is there in reading about people who used to have product…

> Like, if you have complaints about the thing, perhaps you should address them to your supplier directly. None of your readers can help, and nobody's magic folk solution to your problem is better than yours.

I think you may just misunderstand the point of having / writing a personal blog. I write because it's fun! Whether the reader gets any value out of reading it is almost entirely beside the point.

(Also several comments here directly post a fix to the problem stated in the blog post, so readers can and do often help)

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#115

Post by dofm »

kelnos wrote: post #102
LPisGood wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to ask: do you still write a lot of code yourself? I and most people I know do not.

Yes, nearly all of it. Having the agent write code for me doesn't really save me much time, and the code quality is usually worse (and it takes even more time if I insist on better code quality from the agent). And I don't think I'm unique. I see enough posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777257 pop up that I'm reasonably confident all the hype around LLMs saving so much time and increasing productivity…

I am more fully invested in finding out ways AI can support me (documentation, code analysis, bughunting), though my experience with Claude as a bughunter is that it can miss the absolutely obvious if it is not in the shape it is expecting.

More generally I am interested in burnout-avoidance tools; things that help me start, finish, things that write tests I guess, certainly code scaffolding.

But I am fully unconvinced that my burnout will be improved by ending up owning the responsibility for wobbly or inscrutable AI-generated code with potential landmines in it; that will keep me up at night just the same.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#116

Post by prakharjain »

sdesol wrote: post #25
wongarsu wrote: post #8

I agree with the take not to bother with a sophisticated memory system. Anything worth remembering should be in docs, guides, source comments, commit messages or tickets. You don't need another layer, every conceivable granularity is already covered by existing best practices

> You don't need another layer I do think we need another layer, but it should be a routing layer. I am finalizing my pi-brains extension for Pi ( https://github.com/earendil-works/pi ) which does this: https://github.com/gitsense/pi-brains Right now "humans" need to define the routing rules for how to access information, but I will support what I call "knowledge agents" that can monitor conversations to inject conte…

It looks like an interesting experiment. But a hard problem since it needs to store useful information and be able to inject it at the right time. It will also need to not be redundant to the information already stored.

What do you think is the potential value that you might get out of this, which is not already available with the existing options?

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#118

Post by singpolyma3 »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #24
dofm wrote: post #9

Blog posts like this just blow me away. > I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself. > […] > We don't really write code by hand anymore. Honestly, isn't this just influencer spam? What possible value is there in reading about people who used to have product…

It reminds me of the peak crypto days. Lots of resources consumed, many late nights, little to no value created.

I don't understand this line or reasoning. People use various cryptocurrencies to buy and sell legitimate products and services every day. Is the argument just that they could probably have done it some other way?

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#119

Post by dofm »

koolba wrote: post #106
general_reveal wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’ll be the programmers version of those civil war reenactments.

The two sides would be the strongly typed union and the duck typed heretics of the confederacy.

Singing two different battle songs set to the tune of Code Monkey.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#120

Post by estearum »

pydry wrote: post #56
dofm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about impressing people. We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore? Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me — in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.

Nobody cares about code quality /s They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like reliability and speed of development.

Right, and to the extent that your coding practices contribute to reliability and speed of development, they are "of quality."

Now do the same exercise for "impressiveness" and "crassness."

Here, I'll do it for you:

> Nobody cares about code quality /s

> They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like impressiveness and lack of crassness.

Sounds silly doesn't it?

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