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Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

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Re: Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

#241

Post by archargelod »

pydry wrote: post #230
swiftcoder wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude can write the code for you but it can’t understand it for you Part of the problem is that Claude can go spelunking in a spaghetti codebase far faster than us humans. It doesn't necessarily help you understand the project, but if you farm that understanding out to Claude, you can keep working long after the codebase has become unusable for humans...

Ive often wondered what people do when the mess is so bad that Claude hits a wall and nothing works.

Apparently, from what I usually see, they start a completely new project every couple of days. Some revibe their older projects from scratch, with "better" prompts (surely that was the problem).

Re: Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

#242

Post by romanovcode »

sgt101 wrote: post #235

This is interesting and all, but why should we believe any of it? 1) This guy has a track record (confessed) of making shit up, yapping on about it, and pushing it on the innocent. He's done a bunch of damage with his bullshit and now wants us to pay attention again. I mean - something something off fella. 2) There is NO EVIDENCE AT ALL that his ideas are good. He's just making stuff up. Give me a reason. Also should…

It's just a long ad for his product - humanlayer.

Re: Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

#243

Post by pydry »

archargelod wrote: post #241
pydry wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive often wondered what people do when the mess is so bad that Claude hits a wall and nothing works.

Apparently, from what I usually see, they start a completely new project every couple of days. Some revibe their older projects from scratch, with "better" prompts (surely that was the problem).

can't do that with a project in production users are depending on

Re: Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

#244

Post by spion »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #133

Love the idea of RL for codebase health. And a benchmark to measure against! Imagine a "MaintainabilityBench" that rewards models which detect code duplication while working on a task and perform some refactor instead of glibly duplicating; or that detect the need for a new architectural layer, or that hoist a type constraint so there's no need for dumb casts. You can keep on imagining scenarios. There are probably a…

sometimes you forsee the code developing vastly differently between the two copies so you don't want the refactor. it really all comes down to lack of online learning and contextual awareness; memento mori notes are about as effective as developers with no expertise reading the design patterns book (well, ok, they are effective, but not sufficiently and not always directionally correct as its hard to accurately encode the nuance with language)

Re: Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

#245

Post by johnxianren »

spion wrote: post #244
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #133

Love the idea of RL for codebase health. And a benchmark to measure against! Imagine a "MaintainabilityBench" that rewards models which detect code duplication while working on a task and perform some refactor instead of glibly duplicating; or that detect the need for a new architectural layer, or that hoist a type constraint so there's no need for dumb casts. You can keep on imagining scenarios. There are probably a…

sometimes you forsee the code developing vastly differently between the two copies so you don't want the refactor. it really all comes down to lack of online learning and contextual awareness; memento mori notes are about as effective as developers with no expertise reading the design patterns book (well, ok, they are effective, but not sufficiently and not always directionally correct as its hard to accurately encod…

So true.

So when you see that split coming, do you drop a quick warning, or just copy-paste and leave the mess for tomorrow?

Re: Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

#246

Post by rglynn »

onion2k wrote: post #205
rglynn wrote: post #8

To me, the thing that stands out about the whole state we're in here is PR review. Yes, in an ideal world, PRs read well, are a joy to review, reflect what you discussed etc etc. We have to be real; there is only so much we can do to that end. I'm not sure how the best teams do PR review, from my perspective it sucks . I'm talking specifically about the UX. I've always hated Github's PR page, so I typically reviewed…

I'm not sure how the best teams do PR review.. They don't do them. They discuss the changes as the team are doing them (software design and architecture), they automate all the things that would be nitpicks (linting, formatting, etc), and they adhere to a strict 'Do not break the build' rule so merging in something can't be disastrous (with a lot of automated checks and tests to prove that's true). They also make sur…

Thank you for this response. I do think this hits home as the most elegant and reasonable approach. For my teams currently, I can see us already moving toward this implicitly, but perhaps needing to take a more explicit approach. I think your framing crystalises it well.

Re: Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

#247

Post by gyulai »

romanovcode wrote: post #242
sgt101 wrote: post #235

This is interesting and all, but why should we believe any of it? 1) This guy has a track record (confessed) of making shit up, yapping on about it, and pushing it on the innocent. He's done a bunch of damage with his bullshit and now wants us to pay attention again. I mean - something something off fella. 2) There is NO EVIDENCE AT ALL that his ideas are good. He's just making stuff up. Give me a reason. Also should…

It's just a long ad for his product - humanlayer.

> NO EVIDENCE AT ALL

It's funny how, when the hype is strong enough, the burden of proof around the need for EVIDENCE suddenly shifts.

Normally, the burden of proof is on $NEWFANGLED_THING to prove it's better than $TRIED_AND_TESTED.

Software dark factories where no one looks at code are that unproven newfangled thing and all he's really saying is that, in his experience/assessment, those don't work, so he's trying to find other modes of human-ai-collaboration that might actually work that capitalize better on the things (humans) that weren't broke and didn't need fixing when gen-ai coding came along; and then getting the word out about that.

Under normal circumstances there would be absolutely no ground for any controversy around such a stance. Instead, he's having to contend with reactions like: "But $HYPED_UP_THING, and how great that is is all that anyone is talking about! Don't listen to him, he's just trying to sell you something (other than what everyone else is trying to sell). ...naysayer probably thinks he's smarter than everyone."

Re: Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

#249

Post by spion »

johnxianren wrote: post #245
spion wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sometimes you forsee the code developing vastly differently between the two copies so you don't want the refactor. it really all comes down to lack of online learning and contextual awareness; memento mori notes are about as effective as developers with no expertise reading the design patterns book (well, ok, they are effective, but not sufficiently and not always directionally correct as its hard to accurately encod…

So true. So when you see that split coming, do you drop a quick warning, or just copy-paste and leave the mess for tomorrow?

https://sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/20/the-wrong-abstraction probably describes what happens with sufficient nuance

Re: Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)

#250

Post by sarchertech »

bandrami wrote: post #182
sathish316 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re working on an app or software that has few users, no revenue or minimal revenue, tolerance to bugs is higher and just another Claude prompt away, Software factories are a perfect fit. Most personal software or hobby software or 0-1 yet-to-find-PMF startups belong in this category. You can even take a stand that you’ll never look at the code and just ship. This is a perfect equilibrium for a Software factory…

> few users, no revenue or minimal revenue The 900 pound gorilla has for a while been "where is all the output of these LLMs?", and this seems to be the answer; the number of apps on the various app stores has skyrocketed over the past two quarters but installs overall are actually down a little bit. So it seems like we've had an explosion of software that one or two people use. Which is a cool situation to think abo…

I haven’t checked in recently but a couple months ago there was an increase on the Apple App Store, but not on Android.

And when I did a spot check, most new apps were just wrappers around LLM APIs.

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