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AI changes the economics of software rewrites

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Re: AI changes the economics of software rewrites

#51

Post by AndrewThrowaway »

LtWorf wrote: post #47
AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Is it LLMs fault or yours to believing in it so much.

"Coding is solved"

Coding, programming and engineering are all a bit different concepts. Coding as in typing in the code might be solved. Engineering? Doubt.

What is definitely not solved is knowing what you want and what user wants and what the end result is supposed to be. To write the code you need the specs and to write the specs you need to know what you want. And that can only be answered by years of therapy.

Re: AI changes the economics of software rewrites

#52

Post by cjfd »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #6
nottorp wrote: post #3

Does it really change the whys of rewriting? https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Maybe the LLM will catch and reproduce all corner cases... maybe not...

Joel is right, but he's also wrong. I've been on the other side of a timid engineering culture that commerical rides roughshod over and its this depressing immeasurable decline. The company stagnates and slowly tailspins around an unmaintainable product until a competitor steals their lunch in a way that that further obscures cause and effect. Estimates are considerably longer, QA is much harder, integration is full…

Well, Joel is not saying not to refactor anything. In fact he is advocating improving the code quality in small steps. What is missing there is that in practice improving code quality in small steps requires automated tests . But I guess he can be forgiven given when he wrote the article.

Re: AI changes the economics of software rewrites

#53

Post by crnkofe »

I had an itch to rewrite every project after it got large enough and have rewritten some of them. The tragedy of rewriting stuff is that it often ends up becoming more of a duplicate than an improved original. Its hard to see all the edge cases when skimming codebase from afar. Maybe for prototyped code it could work. Not sure if feeding prototype AI slop into AI will produce results though. GIGO. Rewriting code is anyhow not the critical aspect. Its testing and QAing the result and legacy edge cases that's the most time consuming part and that isn't really covered by writing more code.

Re: AI changes the economics of software rewrites

#54

Post by jdw64 »

apsurd wrote: post #49
jdw64 wrote: post #17

The point where I truly feel that AI is a game changer is that these kinds of posts keep appearing. Tautological outcries keep going on both sides, pro and con, endlessly repeating circular logic. There's no real substance or evidence, and rather than discussing how things were actually applied, it's just an echo chamber for whatever group you belong to. In that sense, my homepage ( https://www.makonea.com/en-US ) do…

this post is no good. It's a continual rehash of what's going on in the industry. That's how all social media is, it's entirely time sensitive, keep saying the the same things and be the one to say it so the discussion happens on your "content". OP is playing the game. The post literally says "from LinkedIn" so if you look, he has 500+ connections and 1400 followers. That's not nothing. Good for him, all advice point…

Thank you. I'll do my best too. I appreciate your encouragement

Re: AI changes the economics of software rewrites

#55

Post by socketcluster »

I agree that AI does well when the patterns in the code are predictable and consistent.

That said it can work surprisingly well with custom frameworks and tools provided that they are predictable and consistent.

For example, I created a platform with custom Web Components. Agents do a great job at using the components by reading the docs. I find it a lot easier and more succinct than React. I think it's because AI isn't as good with high level patterns when there are too many pieces involved and too many sub-patterns to apply, it gets so caught up in the details that it misses the forest for the trees.

My SDK abstracts away a lot of low-level complexity so that agents are able to focus on higher-level architectural patterns. Also, it's very succinct so agents can fit a lot of context/functionality into its context window. It gets faster and better as the codebase grows.

Here's the link if anyone wants to try: https://saasufy.com/

Re: AI changes the economics of software rewrites

#56

Post by bulbar »

rapidaneurism wrote: post #42
fxtentacle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. I tried to refactor parts of a large code base with Fable+ultracode and it just keeps accidentally merging distinct concepts and making up explanations/reasonings that the code base did not contain. For example, the code base contains a physical controller. It’s closed loop in that it can react in realtime to changes. But it’s a slightly untypical implementation because this one can even look into the fu…

Would putting that in black and white in the comments around then controller help?

I feel like there are a lot "you are holding it wrong" arguments flying around. Like, when somebody says that AI wasn't able to accomplish something, people tend to assume it's an User problem.

Meanwhile, I have a hard time to believe people don't encounter problems with AI solutions on a regular basis (I do).

Re: AI changes the economics of software rewrites

#57

Post by Semaphor »

trollbridge wrote: post #46
Semaphor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on a codebase from the early 2000s, a lot of it using webforms, a long abandoned .NET technology. A rewrite preserving all behavior and making no observable changes whatsoever would be amazing. But it’s also tested exactly as well as you’d expect from something like that so I’d rather not let AI go wild.

LLMs/agents are a great way to create a test harness for something like that.

I plan to eventually get there, just need to find the time. It’s a lot of code, and a lot of it is not set up for testability.

Re: AI changes the economics of software rewrites

#58

Post by LtWorf »

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #51
LtWorf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Coding is solved"

Coding, programming and engineering are all a bit different concepts. Coding as in typing in the code might be solved. Engineering? Doubt. What is definitely not solved is knowing what you want and what user wants and what the end result is supposed to be. To write the code you need the specs and to write the specs you need to know what you want. And that can only be answered by years of therapy.

You can't be mad at people for buying a product from the LLM salespeople and expect the product to comply to the specs they sold you. Be mad at the salespeople scamming customers.

Re: AI changes the economics of software rewrites

#59

Post by vogelke »

fxtentacle wrote: post #27
karlkloss wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also true for humans.

Humans will typically learn after you have forced them to apologise for the same mistake for 20 times in a row. AI won’t.

I love this. Straight into my quotes file.

Re: AI changes the economics of software rewrites

#60

Post by esseph »

al_borland wrote: post #38
AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you gave some junior dev a large codebase and just told to "refactor it" you would get a terrible result. If you gave junior dev exact tasks what to do where you will get better results. Just like with LLM.

That’s why junior devs generally aren’t give the responsibility of architecting a large scale refactor. Yet people seem to be trying to had these types of tasks over to LLMs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48841676
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