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The Tower Keeps Rising

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Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#21

Post by calvinmorrison »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #18
calvinmorrison wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. some stuff has gotten less. Major databases now ship effective HA tooling, microservices seem on their way out, structured databases seem to be back in instead of NoSQL. HTML and pre-rendering are back in, HTMx, liveview The degaussing of CSS and the hacks we did, hell i was trying to explain how we debugged web pages in IE6 to a younger staff member today. Some things are more complex, some things got…

> Major databases now ship effective HA tooling Which ones? PostgreSQL doesn't have HA in core.

MySQL 8, but upon review that was 2018. 5.7 had some but it's certainly improved overall since then as well

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#22

Post by pixl97 »

sixtyj wrote: post #5

> There is the appealing idea that AI-assisted programming means better tools which lets us build more ambitious software. That is certainly true at the level of the individual and without doubt a developer with an agent will be dramatically more capable of changing a codebase. But large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people c…

>Since Nov 30, 2022 BC everything has become… more complex.

FTFY

Increasing complexity is the story of mankind. It's the story of civilization.

Someone from 20,000 BC would wander around the earth trying to find food, trying not to freeze, and trying not to get eaten. Someone from 5,000 BC would be trying to grow food, hoping it rains, and hoping disease didn't wipe out the village. The second one increases the complexity from all the systems required to manage people and keep the land growing. Today the vast majority of people on earth don't grow their own food at all, and instead are busy in some way managing the complexity of a large society.

Someone from 1970-80 would think our software from pre-llm days was vastly more complex. They'd just code directly to the hardware with no abstraction layer. Now almost no one does that. We abstracted the hardware away in most cases. With cryptography libraries for the vast majority of people it's complexity is abstracted away and mostly people are told "don't try to write your own crypto because you will fuck it up".

The question now becomes, how quickly will LLMs be able to coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing?

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#23

Post by trjordan »

The agent will always fill in the gaps in your understanding. It's not a compiler. It's categorically different from any of the other ways we've built software.

I'm not sure reading code is coming back. The ritual of reading code must come back, because that's the only way to build products that don't collapse under their own incoherence, both technically and visibly.

"just ask Claude" is fine, but it's not the end state

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#25

Post by jagenabler2 »

m3kw9 wrote: post #8

You use a shared agents.md and an auto updated architecture doc but that is the one that needs to be heavily scrutinized and everyone gets a turn to review it.

this doesn't work in any truly complex system. If the entire organization's shared understanding could be captured in a few documents, software engineering would've been a solved problem ages ago.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#26

Post by gwbas1c »

snarf21 wrote: post #16
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #7

My comment is not directly responding to the essay, but it got me thinking about about how agentic programming is much more akin to management than it is to actual programming. Managers generally only have a high level idea of what ICs are working on and often don't have the time, bandwidth, and in some cases ability to understand everything the ICs they're supervising are doing. As more and more software gets writte…

It feels to me like I'm stuck doing code reviews for a junior dev all day so I use it as little as possible and mostly to look for things I may have missed.

It's great for "mechanical" changes.

For example, yesterday I came across some unit tests that didn't have error messages in their assertions. Normally, it takes me ~10 minutes to fix a handful of tests in this situation. In this case, I gave a 2-3 sentence prompt, went to the bathroom, and reviewed the result after I washed my hands. Saved me a bunch of time!

I encourage you to accept a feeling of "imposter syndrome" when using it, and keep trying new things with it. Don't feel like you have to be hands off, except when you're confident that you can be. (IE, if you think you need to spend 30+ minutes on mindless refactoring, see if you can explain it to an agent and then look at HN while it runs. You might get a good result, otherwise, it probably was time for a break anyway.)

BTW: It's important to try different models. The Claude 5.0 models are slow and give me bad results, so I'm sticking with 4.x for now.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#27

Post by ssivark »

The core thesis of this essay is reminiscent of the Lisp Curse [1] / Bipolar Lisp Programmer [2].

It's been a few years since I read these, but if I recall the argument there, it was that Lisp makes it so easy to build stuff and scratch exactly your own itch, that there's no real strong push for lisp programmers to come together and collaborate to build non-trivial and general purpose artifacts. And that is why the landscape of public lisp software is poorer as a result, compared to languages which demand much more effort to get anything substantial done.

Armin seems to be making a very similar point about AI coding.

[1] https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

[2] https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html

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