I believe issues will arive with AI in the near future in terms of their performance. Disagreeing with the author, I think code quality pre-AI, in certain languages, were golden. They all contained bugs but they were written in a way that bug sources would be more or less obvious and most but not all top open source software had linting guidelines, code styles & friends to help make it ingestible. Perhaps these helped said project's maintainers a great lot, but it absolutely SAVED AI when it came to training data. These top-quality repositories with thousands of lines of great code combined with hundred thousand lines of mixed quality code was the perfect formula for the big data churner™. Now what? All those repos, inflated with stars are generated by one of the 5 LLMs out there. There has been extended discussions about deterministic behaviour in LLMs, and I'm no ML engineer but to me this drop in entropy will surely cause backtracking in code quality. Of course there a vast array of improvements that can be made outside of training data, but the whole psychology attached to LLM marketing, in my opinion, obstructs those improvements. You could train a better suited way of input for LLMs, set cutoffs and posttraining in just the right places and everything but you gotta think it through. How many of those who ask their favourite LLM everything think anymore? How much of our current knowledge is safe from AI hallucinations or subtle nudges? AI has changed the world of coding, but the current state in Anthropic HQ will determine if it will just be mid-quality codegen or accelerationist fever dream.
Control the Ideas, Not the Code
51–60 of 208 posts
Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
not sure i follow, thats the whole cloud hosting model. yeah you can self host to avoid that but thats a whole another tangent. If you are already locked in then whats the benfit of choosing redis from a pointy haired boss prespective.
Amazon and Google are pouring resources into reducing the fitness of the Redis project, pilfering insane revenues, yet not once has either offered to open source their own core platforms. They're attacking another company that is powerless to defend itself. And the community cheers it on. How kind of them to ensure valkey remains "open" so you can continue to purchase it through their hyperscaler product. They'll get…
They're doing exactly the same thing to Valkey that they're doing to Redis, it's just more legal. Somehow Valkey is more successful because of it.
Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code
#53Very uncomfortable to read. The proposed idea of not reading the code you ostensibly wrote, doesn’t just challenge the traditional workflow or methodology, it challenges the identity of a programmer itself. For experienced, respected programmers like antirez perhaps reading and writing code truly has just gotten in the way of the ideas, but I cannot identify with that perspective. The devil is in the details, reading…
For complex code changes or bigger features I often spend hours with an LLM refining architecture, exploring alternate directions, trying to find alternate directions in the first place, clarifying design questions, etc. It's not that you spend less time refining ideas, you just do it at another level of abstraction
But that does come with tradeoffs, and it's not the right thing for every project. But when it does work it does increase the amount of work you get out in the same time
Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code
#54I tried really hard to do this, but it turns out the models don't care about your ideas and want to do what's popular in their training data, so they will happily ignore anything you try to force down their throats, especially as context length grows or if you hit compaction. So to make best use of the models steer them down familiar paths, mention common pattern and frameworks, use popular packages and languages tha…
right, the model will listen to you for ~32k context; half of that is just getting them into the "downhill" path for being a coding assistant. You can throw in whatever your heart's desire and if it's a single fix, it might listen to you; but treating it like a smart-IDE basically means it'll follow whatever dominant pattern is in the training data. If we had smart capitalism (the SAME PROBLEM) we'd realize what we w…
yeah I tried rules, hooks and forbidding things like pip / python3 but it just led to the model failing to do what it wants and a bunch of token churn trying to get around my more rigid constraints.
main problem is that the harness files get loaded into context early in the session and slowly wash away as new information comes in.
Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code
#55Code is not literature. It's not poetry. It does not express the human spirit. Code is a machine made of symbols. Engineers do care about the beauty of their machine designs, but in the end what matters is whether the machine performs its function correctly, efficiently, affordably. What's wonderful about software is that the function of software is to take input data and produce output data. Every aspect of it is measurable, if we build it to be measurable, because it's data all the way down. The future of software development is not reading code. It's specifying an outcome, success and failure conditions, and iterating until that outcome is reached. Throw out your software engineering "code quality" manuals, your SOLID and your Clean Code. It doesn't matter now.
Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do highly unusual, off the beaten path projects with AI. For instance, a game engine written entirely in LuaJIT, but allocating almost all data structures using CFFI, a very unusual, custom object-orientation DSL I designed myself, and that uses SDL3's SDL_gpu library to do all rendering, a ton of GLSL 4.6 compute shaders cross compiled to SPIR-V and Metal (which constraints what GLSL can be written), and is a hybr…
> All I can say is skill issue. I don't necessarily disagree with the overall point you're making, but I think calling it a "skill issue" is a bit reductive. These are relatively new tools that are changing quickly, and the amount of flexibility in how you can use them is a lot higher than pretty much anything else we've built up patterns for in the industry in recent years. Rather than dismissing people who express…
In my experience, because as you say, the flexibility of these tools and how you engage with them is so broad, and how much the nuances of thay engagement can often matter, the only way to teach someone how to do what you do with them is to sit down and pair a program with them. Barring that, any instructions you could give would massively under-determined what they actually try as a result of your instructions, and so it ends up being an infinite loop of them just coming back and saying "it doesn't work." So in the end, people really just have to discover how these things work for themselves.
Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code
#57> Matteo Collina yesterday asked me, in reply to my tweet: but didn’t you say that you check all the AI generated code for Redis? And this is a good question indeed. Yes, I do, but this is, at this point, something I need to do but that I believe to be mostly pointless, partially once GPT 5.5 was released, but now with Fable and GPT 5.6 Sol even more. Yes: I identify things that I don’t like how they are coded, but i…
Because Redis is not "my project", it is a piece of software many relies upon, so I use, for that software, what the community at large agrees to be ok: AI-assisted coding with human careful reading and evaluation of every line.
Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code
#58It's kind of ironic reading a post with such bad grammar written by someone that seems to be so pro-AI
You realize he's not a native English speaker, right? His English grammar is better than my Italian, so I don't feel the need to criticize.
Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code
#59There are no "ideas" independent of expression.
What do you mean? Are you arguing that it's impossible to fully translate things? Would you argue that "apple", "manzana", "pomme", "mela", "maçã" etc. all refer to different ideas?
"Apple" is a generic name, that does not actually really express anything particularly specific.
Eating apple, cooking apple, cider apple, pig feed?
Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, Red Delicious? All apples, wildly different, all common. Even within the more commercially available variants there are significant differences: https://www.jessicagavin.com/types-of-apples/
Heck, just for cooking apples there are huge number of different varieties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_apple
Yea, "apple" as an idea doesn't really express anything concrete without lots more context.
And without more context, Apple may even mean something that isn't even a fruit, but still popular: www.apple.com
Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code
#60> Matteo Collina yesterday asked me, in reply to my tweet: but didn’t you say that you check all the AI generated code for Redis? And this is a good question indeed. Yes, I do, but this is, at this point, something I need to do but that I believe to be mostly pointless, partially once GPT 5.5 was released, but now with Fable and GPT 5.6 Sol even more. Yes: I identify things that I don’t like how they are coded, but i…
He is the creator of redis.