I'm about to throw away multiple months of LLM generated code for one of my side projects. I was really careful writing design specs and it wasn't even a new code base the LLM worked on, but still after several months of AI changes I feel my code degraded more and more into a subtle mess. Hard to explain, each individual change looked good and logical and on the surface the codebase looks fine, but looking at the who…
LLMs can write excellent code a few thousand lines at a time but they absolutely can't create a cohesive million line codebase.
AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
201–210 of 317 posts
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah the financial value of a codebase is in successfully solving a problem, which is independent of code quality. It is a painful lesson for many.
> Yeah the financial value of a codebase is in successfully solving a problem It doesn't even need do it successfully, plenty of slow buggy codebases that are raking in huge amounts of money every day. I knew it was bad when I started getting tickets to "improve the skeleton loader" because its displayed for so long the project owner had time to contemplate changes to it.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#203When you have built your working product try this prompt: - Review the codebase is it production ready? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard. Then cry as the ai reveals that it didn't actually do anything close to what it said it did. I call this my million dollar prompt, as in it teaches you just how much you are being fooled.
Popped over to HackerNews, read two comment sections and the top comments in both articles were users saying the same thing: "AI can't write code! The whole thing will come crumbling down any minute! Just you wait!" I've never seen this community like this. Are these people cooked? We are years into this and they haven't been able to figure it out? They are going to continue to tell people using these tools successfu…
It is crumbling down as we speak. There's more software being pumped out than ever, but it's also buggier, more bloated, and just generally worse than ever.
A few days ago I had to revert to an older version of an open source project I use regularly, because the author turned full vibe coder and has pushed hundreds of AI generated commits in just a few weeks, at least one of which completely broke an important feature I relied on.
Whether or not you consider putting out software that technically meets the minimum requirements but is a buggy, broken mess to be a success depends entirely on your personal definition of success. Maybe you do, and you are entitled to your opinion. But once again I feel the need to remind people that we humans did not get where we are today by always doing the bare minimum. If everyone throughout history shared this mentality, we'd still be banging rocks in caves.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In the same way high-level languages are a layer on top of writing machine code manually. Another layer, yes, but NOT "in the same way." It is a new, different kind of layer. The other layers were deterministic, not probabilistic.
I meant that no-one writes assembly anymore. I wasn't around when that transition happened, but I bet there were the same "this high-level language is compiling to inefficient code, it's useless" comments.
A compiler is semantically deterministic. It has a spec. Give it an input and you can know exactly what the output will do. And if there's edge cases where behaviour is undefined, thats also well known apriori.
(And yes, to get ahead of the nitpickers, I know the specific sequence of bytes the compiler will emit can vary (hence the difficulty of reproducible builds), hence why I said "semantically").
LLMs do not share this property. At all. I mean not even close
They are a completely new and different class of tool. They are not just a step up the abstraction layer. They're not compilers for English. To call them that is to fundamentally not grok what a compiler is or does.
That doesn't make them bad. It just makes that analogy, and any conclusions you might draw from it, bad.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Adversarial review loops of N parallel agents looking at whatever characteristics you care about will make it better Especially if different model providers. It becomes more like having team members that see things slightly differently.
It's like a variant of the halting problem though: given N agents in a review loop reviewing a codebase, will it ever terminate and say the thing is done and bug free? It seems to me just from @codex review, given a codebase of any appreciable size, if you ask the agent to find things to fix, it'll find things to fix. And despite N agents agreeing that some code is ready to ship, I've still sat down to try it and not…
Will human reviewers, if you ask them to find more bugs? Will it be because there really are no bugs, or because they got tired and just can't see any?
How would you even figure out when the thing is done and is bug free? There have been bugs that have been in codebases for years and have only been discovered recently.
Would you trust static analysis tools that give you an all clear, when they themselves cannot encode the above desired state fully?
Seems like you'd need formal proofs or something, but at that point also for the frameworks and libraries, database, networking stack and the whole damn OS.
I'm all for good tools, just saying that we'll need a whole bunch of those.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real problem is that we forget that there was a lot of bad code in the early days. When I studied books from 10 to 15 years ago, the patterns that were considered 'common practice' back then would be considered low-quality code today. Our threshold has risen. People tend to forget the rings of experience embedded in community codebases and only look at the final results. And they always claim that only the best r…
Can you give an example of a pattern that was considered common practice in a book 10 to 15 years ago that would be considered low-quality code today? My experience is pretty much the reverse: that we seem to just go round and round relearning the lessons that had already been learned in the past.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#207I'm about to throw away multiple months of LLM generated code for one of my side projects. I was really careful writing design specs and it wasn't even a new code base the LLM worked on, but still after several months of AI changes I feel my code degraded more and more into a subtle mess. Hard to explain, each individual change looked good and logical and on the surface the codebase looks fine, but looking at the who…
This has happened to my side project too. There's so much going on in the code now that I can't possibly grok it to make changes safely by myself any more. But I think that's OK. Because I don't have to grok it anymore. I've been crafting beautiful code for almost 20 years - that itch is scratched. Now I just want to be productive and build cool stuff. AI is helping me make a better end-product in a fraction of the t…
It is hard to me to fathom why anyone would find those limits acceptable, especially with years of experience writing code. It seems something like an experienced painter giving up on their art to doodle with crayons, and maybe that could be cathartic. Maybe you get experience with other aspects of your craft.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#208Things look way worse when working with vibed code. Over the last twelve months or so I encountered a number of issues with code and tests given to me by people with little or no coding experience claiming that this is a finished product and expecting me to "productionise it" (their words, not mine). Because they believe in LLMs like religious zealots and have no idea what programmers with actual experience of writing code are talking about there is a breakdown of communication and a lot of misunderstanding. On my latest project I was given a zip archive and asked to "make it work" by someone who calls themselves a "software architect" but has no idea how software development works. That person was surprised when we asked for a git repository, requirements, and design. None were given and we were told to use Claude to explain what the code is supposed to do. When we pressed for requirements the "architect" sent us a 4-page list of requirements based on the LLMs analysis of the contents of the zip file. It was so vague that it could apply to any project. Similarly, the architect vibed tickets in Jira and we had to clean them up as well, because of their vaugness and repetition or generic requirements. The three of us spent two months turning this turd into a piece of software with working tests and working implementation before we were told a PM will be assigned to our team and we will have to explain to him how the software works and what the requirements are. I am no longer on that project. I have had enough.
Another client forced addition on an AI PR reviewer. After initial excitement every dev on a 200+ team started ignoring it, because the fixes it suggests actually break code.
The marketing around LLMs convinced idiots that they are capable of producing software and that the greatest enemy of delivery are actual software developers with experience of delivering working software. The lowest point must be the recent series of ads I keep seeing on YouTube in which one character gets overly excited because he vibed a to do app... Every OS comes with one and if you don't like them, there are plenty of free and paid alternatives that cost less and work better than "your" vibed app.
I can't wait for the VC money to run out and the LLM madness to go to hell.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#209I think of it this way. If AI could build the product alone, then why would it ever be worth more than the tokens you spent on it? I think this would hold true 99% of the time. It's literally like asking someone "Can you pay me $1m for new gadget? I hired this other dude for $20p/h and he made it in a week". It simply doesn't add up. The 80/20 rule still stands.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah the financial value of a codebase is in successfully solving a problem It doesn't even need do it successfully, plenty of slow buggy codebases that are raking in huge amounts of money every day. I knew it was bad when I started getting tickets to "improve the skeleton loader" because its displayed for so long the project owner had time to contemplate changes to it.
The success or value of a solution isn't measured by its quality, but by its utility to the customer. It's a harsh lesson for anyone who wants to build quality.