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The AI Situation in Software Development

srikanth.ch

31–40 of 76 posts

Re: The AI Situation in Software Development

#31
About "implementing by words bit": I don't believe English is a great language to program.

It's not type-safe, not object oriented, not functional. Has poor tools to highlight syntax or navigate through "wordbase", doesn't fail fast. It has no tests and has too large room for machine or other humans to interpret it.

Very often it's easier for me to express my thoughts in Java, which is ironically known to be a "wordy" language. But it's nowhere close to wordiness of English.

Re: The AI Situation in Software Development

#32
post #4

With previous engineering trends like blockchains and microservices, you could choose not to jump on the bandwagon. However the coding agents trend is different and is changing the very fabric (sry for Claudeism) of software engineering, for better or worse. I do know we will never go back to mainly programming through code again, that’s for sure.

Fortunately, I haven't jumped the bandwagon yet, so I don't even have to think about going back :)

People who are trying to sell you AI and people who are now dependent on it are desperate for you to believe in its inevitability.

Re: The AI Situation in Software Development

#33
post #22

One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…

Have you found any solutions to this? It would be a big unlock to give it this kind of judgement

Re: The AI Situation in Software Development

#34
post #22

One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…

Have you found any solutions to this? It would be a big unlock to give it this kind of judgement

I haven’t used it yet but https://github.com/dietrichgebert/ponytail is somewhat popular.

Re: The AI Situation in Software Development

#36
post #22

One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…

If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives.

Recently I asked Claude (Fable) to use multiple threads to speed up a computation that could take several seconds to run while the user was waiting. Instead, it found a way to start the computation earlier in the background while the user was doing other things, so that it would be finished by the time the user was ready.

Re: The AI Situation in Software Development

#38
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, I haven't jumped the bandwagon yet, so I don't even have to think about going back :)

People who are trying to sell you AI and people who are now dependent on it are desperate for you to believe in its inevitability.

i used to think i love coding. putting some music on and getting into the zone churing code was the best feeling.

stragnely i dont miss that feeling and kind of dread going back to it

Re: The AI Situation in Software Development

#39
post #22

One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…

Have you found any solutions to this? It would be a big unlock to give it this kind of judgement

I have actually found decent success recently (especially with Fable) giving it an "added line budget". This does more than anything else to keep it on task. The trick is knowing an approximate line count beforehand, but sometimes the LLM will push back on what it should cut. But usually it just doesn't add all those "nice to have" redundancies and multipage comments and unit tests that check if a certain phrase is still in the error message.

Re: The AI Situation in Software Development

#40
post #22

One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of t…

Have you found any solutions to this? It would be a big unlock to give it this kind of judgement

Keeping a simple log of "accepted/rejected" avenues is basically all that's needed, maybe with a root style guide in the project. I've got several multi-day sessions in 5.6 Sol running without going off the rails in terms of complexity. After a while in this loop it actually starts to remind/berate itself to keep things straight-forward.
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