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Write code like a human will maintain it

unstack.io

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Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#51

Post by ebiester »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #29

Write yourself a /review command. That is an empty markdown file at `.claude/commands/review.md`. In it, put a checklist of things the agent should look for. When you’re ready to have your agent review the code, type `/review`. The checklist will be examined and it’ll plan out some findings to ask you if you want them fixed. Mine starts with “Enter plan mode. Examine the differences on this branch vs. main. Consider:…

You should do an experiment of splitting that up to multiple reviews that are logically together. My hypothesis is that you may be losing signal due to the amount of text expected back.

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#52

Post by saghm »

schnebbau wrote: post #7

That sounds like a good idea, but shipping 10x as many features and bugfixes sounds better. I started using AI with the best intentions. Checking everything before committing. Improving output by hand if it didn't quite follow the existing code style guidelines or variables were not named as well as they should be. Or if it did something sloppy or hacky. Now, AI GOES BURRRRRRRRRRRR! If the tests pass it's good to shi…

How did you know you're not stuck at a local optimum where the AI could iterate even faster if you enforced higher quality on what it produced?

To make up some hypothetical numbers in order to illustrate with math: if you ship bugfixes 10x faster but then have 11x more bugs you need to fix, that's not a net improvement. Even if it's only 5x more bugs, maybe you could reduce that to 2x if you changed how you worked to only be 8x as fast in a way that produced higher quality code. Similarly, maybe you could cut the time it needed to produce a new feature by 50% if your code were higher quality by moving 20% slower.

My point in all of this isn't that you literally need to work the same way you did before you had these tools, but that framing it as either "move fast and ignore the code" and "use the same exact heuristics you would in the pre-LLM days for what code is acceptable" is a false dichotomy. If you aren't thinking about how effectively you're using these tools and whether there are changes you could make to move even faster because "AI go brrr", I think you've lost the plot in the same way you probably think that other people in this thread have.

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#53

Post by exabrial »

schnebbau wrote: post #7

That sounds like a good idea, but shipping 10x as many features and bugfixes sounds better. I started using AI with the best intentions. Checking everything before committing. Improving output by hand if it didn't quite follow the existing code style guidelines or variables were not named as well as they should be. Or if it did something sloppy or hacky. Now, AI GOES BURRRRRRRRRRRR! If the tests pass it's good to shi…

One does not exclude the other

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#54

Post by latexr »

Invictus0 wrote: post #4

[flagged]

It’s bizarre to me that so many people feel the need to keep parroting this corporate talking point. What do you care? If you think people who eschew LLMs for coding “are not going to make it” or “are going to get left behind”¹, then let them. More opportunities for you, right? Go do your own thing.

¹ As if “moving forward” or “progress” were always a positive. It’s not. Just look at how many regulations we have to forbid or curtail uses of stuff we found to be harmful.

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#55

Post by latexr »

theultdev wrote: post #34
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unlikely that AI will get to the point where it makes handwritten coders redundant, and then not immediately be at the point where vibe coders are redundant too. So if you earnestly take the position that handwriting code is a "ngmi" type activity, you also need to take the position that the vibe coder (or agent- assisted-developer/loop-architect, or whatever its nom de guerre is this week) is "ngmi".

He just means the development pace has picked up with AI. I've been doing this for 15 years, I love coding manually. However, with AI-assistance I can do projects in 3 days what would take 6 months. It's not vibe coding, everything is controlled, reviewed, understood, refined by me in the end. But still the dev time is magnitudes faster. I would not hire anyone that is adverse to AI. I'm actually happier. With age an…

> I can do projects in 3 days what would take 6 months.

The hyperbole on this keeps growing every time I see it. Soon we’ll be having people claiming they can do in 12 seconds what used to take them 17 years. What is never presented is proof. People (and programmers are no exception) are notoriously bad at estimating. We already did studies where people thought they were being faster with LLMs when they were in fact being slower.

As companies begin to rehire to fix the mess made by LLMs, it’s clear that just getting something out the door isn’t enough. It never was. Maintenance is an important part of any long-standing system.

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#56

Post by is_true »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #29

Write yourself a /review command. That is an empty markdown file at `.claude/commands/review.md`. In it, put a checklist of things the agent should look for. When you’re ready to have your agent review the code, type `/review`. The checklist will be examined and it’ll plan out some findings to ask you if you want them fixed. Mine starts with “Enter plan mode. Examine the differences on this branch vs. main. Consider:…

Nice. I had a file with code samples (old code I wrote), including formatting and I asked to use it as a reference.

Will try your approach to distill the code to bullet points.

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#57

Post by Forgeties79 »

trjordan wrote: post #38

AI is so miserable for this. It's so focused on doing what you ask, it forgets that there's stuff worth doing that you didn't ask for, like defining reasonable abstractions. Getting away from stuff like this is exactly why I want to use AI. When I say "implement this for idle but active users," I _want_it to define isUserActiveIdle() and stuff these 4 conditionals in it. Having to check the generated code for stuff l…

[flagged]

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#58

Post by jraph »

saghm wrote: post #35
hansonkd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comments that drive the most homicidal behavior are outdated or inaccurate comments rather than no comments.

Sure, but the proportion of code that drives homicidal behavior is heavily weighted towards non-comments. You're a lot more likely to piss off whoever inherits your code with the code that actually does something being bad or a lack of documentation than with comments.

I'm quite fine with no comments but correctly named variables and functions. This can't become out of sync contrarily to "out of band" comments. I take this over commented code with poorly named stuff any day.

I've also seen a lot of comments that restate what the code already says and that's just noise, more work to keep in sync, an additional thing that can fail, and more cognitive load because you have to read twice the same thing (best case, if code and comment are still in sync). That's the result you risk when you think you must comment your code.

I appreciate the occasional comment that explains why something seems overly tricky or weird or not immediately intuitive. Once, I had left such a comment that saved myself years later from making a mistake. Of course, this should be kept at a minimal level. It leads to me liking clear code with few comments the most. (Some guidelines, even if it's not perfect, to limit complexity and spaghetti code help a lot).

Function, class, module documentation is also useful so you don't have to read the whole thing and you know what it's intended to provide (which is slightly different than simply what it provides, and this differences is important).

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#59

Post by swatcoder »

schnebbau wrote: post #7

That sounds like a good idea, but shipping 10x as many features and bugfixes sounds better. I started using AI with the best intentions. Checking everything before committing. Improving output by hand if it didn't quite follow the existing code style guidelines or variables were not named as well as they should be. Or if it did something sloppy or hacky. Now, AI GOES BURRRRRRRRRRRR! If the tests pass it's good to shi…

> shipping 10x as many features and bugfixes sounds better

I understand you're excited about the tool, but for the sake of earnest discussion here, maybe commenters like yourself can tone the hype down to plausibility?

Claims like this are just nonsense. It's not how product development works.

How do you even have so many bugs left to fix if the tool is so fast and productive? Surely, you didn't have a backlog of tens of thousands of bugs that you're still chewing through? And of course, the volume of new bugs much be minimal since the AI-composed additions introduce "no problems so far". If it works like you say, which we'll accept in good faith per HN guidelines, you must have exhausted your backlog long ago.

And if you've indeed exhausted your bug backlog long ago (incredible!), you're left to talking about shipping "10x as many features". Yet no product has a limitless capacity for features. Nobody would want to use software so bloated and churning that was gaining features at such a pace. And who is designing and specifying them so quickly anyway? If it works like you say, which we again accept in good faith, you must have stalled out on your feature list long ago.

If the AI indeed allows you to "[ship] 10x as many features and bugfixes", and we take what you say in good faith, then one of the following seems to be implied:

* you've fixed all your bugs and blew through your mature feature designs already, leaving your AI agents sitting idle for all but a few hours a week, while you're bottlenecked on feature design and your software product is bloated beyond imagination

* your coding productivity before AI was absolutely glacial by industry standards such that "10x" productivity for you is actually much closer to "0.5-2x" for others

Any insight into which of those it might be?

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