Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
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Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
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Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
#2> In the past year, agent harnesses crossed the “can it be done” rubicon.
Brother, I'm still in "Can you get it right?"-mode. What am I doing wrong? (Rhetorical, but advice welcomed).
Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
#3> In the past year, agent harnesses crossed the “can it be done” rubicon. Brother, I'm still in "Can you get it right?"-mode. What am I doing wrong? (Rhetorical, but advice welcomed).
What is “it” specifically and what languages are you using?
Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
#4> In the past year, agent harnesses crossed the “can it be done” rubicon. Brother, I'm still in "Can you get it right?"-mode. What am I doing wrong? (Rhetorical, but advice welcomed).
I’ve found some success is small projects, with limited scope, in a greenfield.
I’m terrified to attempt agentic anything in the repo my job actually cares about. I triggered it once by accident, when the agent was first rolled out and enabled by default… it broke everything. Now I just use ask mode, and even that is wrong half the time, and once it goes wrong it just keeps getting worse.
I saw a post from Dave Plumber who vibe coded up a new cross platform task manager. He said his spec document for the AI was 107 pages long. So maybe what I’m doing wrong is not giving the AI a literal novel of spec.
Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
#5With generated code, the directory structure, interface design and general state management is usually a haphazard mess. Even with the best frontier models. But what really gets me is the model often tries to make assumptions for me that I didn't specify in the prompt. Subtle things like which error states are "oh shit we need to bail" vs "this isn't a deal breaker." Sometimes it will ask, but more often than not it will just make a decision and it's often the wrong one. If I don't have a fully kitted out test suit and a good type checker to verify the final product against, the the whole looping thing is just useless to me and I'm back to reviewing every line of code it puts out and having to draw on my years of architecture experience to make sure we don't build a giant pile of trash.
Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
#6With generated code, the directory structure, interface design and general state management is usually a haphazard mess. Even with the best frontier models. But what really gets me is the model often tries to make assumptions for me that I didn't specify in the prompt. Subtle things like which error states are "oh shit we need to bail" vs "this isn't a deal breaker." Sometimes it will ask, but more often than not it…
Because they are designed to be used by managers who don't know how to answer these questions and don't want to be asked them. Just have the magic answers box pick something.
Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
#7With generated code, the directory structure, interface design and general state management is usually a haphazard mess. Even with the best frontier models. But what really gets me is the model often tries to make assumptions for me that I didn't specify in the prompt. Subtle things like which error states are "oh shit we need to bail" vs "this isn't a deal breaker." Sometimes it will ask, but more often than not it…
They're RLHF'ed to an inch of their lives to be able to one-shot complete tasks, since requiring human input defeats the purpose of being able to replace the labor force.
But once the insanity ends LLMs will be packaged as tools for developers to use to boost their productivity, and we'll consider them as we do IDE's and debuggers and stuff. But we have to get through this hype cycle first.
Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
#8> It helps to know that LLMs don’t “reason”. They predict ..
Semantics. Prediction is the training objective. The ability to reason can be, and very arguably is, an emergent property of that.
Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
#9> In the past year, agent harnesses crossed the “can it be done” rubicon. Brother, I'm still in "Can you get it right?"-mode. What am I doing wrong? (Rhetorical, but advice welcomed).
Tell it to use red/green TDD and start things off with an already configured test suite, maybe with a single test that asserts 1+1==2.
Make sure it know how to run the tests before it starts writing any additional code.
Then set it a clear goal.
Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
#10"They’re foundationally incapable of always and consistently preventing prompt injection attacks. “Alignment work”, safety harnesses, and sandboxes all help to add barriers against the worst, but there are fundamental gap" ...
They seem to be very good at a lot of rudimentary best practices, more so than humans, but more accurately - if you run and audit pass with specific instructions ... they're very good at that.
I mean - it's what they're the best at which is applying 'fuzzy heuristics' in a mechanical way. If can describe issues concisely, the patterns, the styles, the rules then LLMs can very mechanistically and methodologically grind through them.
I don't even see how this is controversial - without getting into 'what their reasoning means' - we can all agree that their synthetic reasoning is pretty good at narrow scales, and they've been 'trained by compilers' and are extremely good at spotting common patterns.
If you back that up with a lot of tokens ... they excel.
Designing architecture, that's difficult, but hammering away at all the 'known-knows across a system' especially to identify things ... they're pretty good at that.