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Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

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Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

#241

Post by Rebuff5007 »

blub wrote: post #221
Rebuff5007 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a sad retelling of reality. A large amount of ikea furniture is not cheap particle board crap. they have a range of materials for all of their products, and even some of the medium end products look nice and hold well. Additionally, many middle-class families have "back in the day" stories where their houses were filled with bare essentials for which i'm sure an ikea bed frame would feel like an upgrade. I think…

Names and links or they don’t exist :) Even their absolute high-end stuff is at best particle board with veneer. And you can bet the back will still be that thin 3mm fiberboard, no matter how high-end they look. Unfortunately, top models nowadays have more and more hollow panels. Seems to me that quality’s going down and they’re trying to save money with the materials they offer. But they can still be a good enough c…

How lazy do you have to be... within seconds of hitting ikea.com:

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/skogsta-table-acacia-black-0045... https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/hemnes-chest-of-6-drawers-white...

The wood types are clearly labeled, so its not something they are trying to hide. And i'm not sure why hollow panels in itself are necessarily a bad thing...cutting down on material without hurting design or functionality has plenty of benefits (environmental, weight, cost).

Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

#242

Post by whstl »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #211
whstl wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And it's not just PMs. Everyone with any responsibility for picking any software in a company will work very hard to make things harder and more expensive, rather than easier. People will ask for a 100k-year app, or whatever is the Ferrari of their business. If they don't get it, they will ask for the complex features they saw in that 100k-year software package, even if they won't use it. If it internal software…

> The only situation where I didn't see this happening was in startups where people are actually busy. FWIW you still see this, it just tends to not survive for too long.

Yeah, that's true. Eventually you get the second batch of people who insist on doing things their way, and then that culture slowly dies.

I haven't seen any company recover from that, ever. Once they balloon to 250, 500, 1000, 2000 employees, any attempt to recover by injecting new blood is futile, you only burn out the new blood and enrages the people in the new culture. Then it dies.

This happened to a company I worked for, whose domain just expired this week, I will probably purchase them.

Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

#243

Post by theshrike79 »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #196
sashank_1509 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical sentiment I see that completely lacks any nuance. For one car vs IKEA are two completely different beasts entirely. A car opened up new avenues that a human could never do before its invention. This itself makes it a far more worthy invention than most. IKEA cheapened stuff and gave low quality cookie cutter furniture to everyone. Was this really a great thing, that propelled humanity forward? It’s also not l…

IKEA allowed people to afford decent quality furniture who otherwise couldn’t afford it. That’s a huge benefit in my view. Your “spend a bit more” is actually a huge amount for artisanal quality furniture. That’s how commodization has always worked. Something is suddenly available for the masses with maybe some loss of quality. Look at Excel. A lot of elitists look down on people doing complex stuff with it but in re…

Not just decent quality, decently looking furniture.

If you look at any architectural magazine, you can in most cases spot a few IKEA pieces in there if you know how to look. Because they look "good" - or at least mostly neutral.

Cheap furniture used to _look_ cheap before IKEA.

Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

#244

Post by theshrike79 »

spacemanspiff01 wrote: post #177
mekoka wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your goal is to take over the market quick, as many here would like, maintainability is a very low priority aspect of your code base. Is it? How long do you expect to keep your momentum after "taking over the market"? Anecdata time. I once joined a 3 year old project that had ground itself to a near halt with this philosophy. The project's lead seemed almost allergic to the word "refactoring". It had accrued so…

So one of my thoughts is maybe AI makes this more viable. You continually refactor the code base. Often when you start something you do not know the correct abstractions anyway - so vibe-code it. Then once you have the kinda-sorta prototype, do a full rewrite, try to do component modules with interfaces. (maybe do multiple rewrites depending on architecture complexity) Then incrementally improve the software quality…

This is what I've observed too in actual real life.

Massive refactoring operations that would've never been scheduled, because they would've needed a senior programmer allocated to it for at least a week can now be done to ~80% completion with a good prompt and an LLM in an afternoon.

then the senior dev only has to spend maybe a day or two in the final 20%, mostly confirming that nothing was missed.

Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

#245

Post by neuralkoi »

user43928 wrote: post #31

The article says what many here like to hear, but in my opinion the core arguments are false. > Making software debuggable, maintainable, layered, and composable – that’s still quite a trick Not really. I have been working on a mobile app for months, and I stopped even glancing at the code about two months ago. 150k LOC, around half of that in tests, and the AI still has no problem maintaining the code on my behalf.…

Programmers see the LLM as a coder. Others (i.e. business people) see it as a natural-language compiler. Ultimately LLMs will be good enough that there wont be a difference, but programmers will lament the loss of control.

Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

#246

Post by user43928 »

neuralkoi wrote: post #245
user43928 wrote: post #31

The article says what many here like to hear, but in my opinion the core arguments are false. > Making software debuggable, maintainable, layered, and composable – that’s still quite a trick Not really. I have been working on a mobile app for months, and I stopped even glancing at the code about two months ago. 150k LOC, around half of that in tests, and the AI still has no problem maintaining the code on my behalf.…

Programmers see the LLM as a coder. Others (i.e. business people) see it as a natural-language compiler. Ultimately LLMs will be good enough that there wont be a difference, but programmers will lament the loss of control.

Based on my experience, a competent business person could feasibly develop a mobile app today.

However, I suspect that trying this in a team, where developers review the code, is likely a recipe for disaster.

About the natural-language compiler, that reminds me of OpenSpec and the specs as a source of truth instead of the code.

I never tried this myself, and somehow the approach just does not appeal to me at all. Every time I look at those spec files it's somehow exhausting.

I prefer the code as a source of truth and casual conversations with the AI, rather than rigid spec files. But maybe that's just me.

Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

#247

Post by chmod775 »

user43928 wrote: post #31

The article says what many here like to hear, but in my opinion the core arguments are false. > Making software debuggable, maintainable, layered, and composable – that’s still quite a trick Not really. I have been working on a mobile app for months, and I stopped even glancing at the code about two months ago. 150k LOC, around half of that in tests, and the AI still has no problem maintaining the code on my behalf.…

> I'm sure someone is going to reply with how they do not trust Antrophic's research, but lacking other data, prompt injection appears to be largely solved already.

You do not solve "losing russian roulette" by adding more empty chambers. One bullet in 600 chambers is still one bullet too much. How about we don't play the stupid game in the first place?

Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

#248

Post by user43928 »

chmod775 wrote: post #247
user43928 wrote: post #31

The article says what many here like to hear, but in my opinion the core arguments are false. > Making software debuggable, maintainable, layered, and composable – that’s still quite a trick Not really. I have been working on a mobile app for months, and I stopped even glancing at the code about two months ago. 150k LOC, around half of that in tests, and the AI still has no problem maintaining the code on my behalf.…

> I'm sure someone is going to reply with how they do not trust Antrophic's research, but lacking other data, prompt injection appears to be largely solved already. You do not solve "losing russian roulette" by adding more empty chambers. One bullet in 600 chambers is still one bullet too much. How about we don't play the stupid game in the first place?

In this context that probably relates to reducing permissions of the coding agent.

That might be a tradeoff in convenience which one has to assess against the risk. And for that risk assessment, it seems that coding agents with broad permissions are so far used largely without issue by like ten million users.

Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

#249

Post by francisofascii »

mstank wrote: post #70

I have an open question for software engineers out there: As someone that has never studied CS but has written basic code most of my life (accelerated now with AI), where is the best place to learn software engineering fundamentals?

FWIW, here are the books I bought over that years that people would always say you should read. I would say some of the principles might be out of date, wrong, or overkill, but a good goal is to be at least familiar with them.

The Pragmatic Programmer, Design Patterns (or some Gang of 4 book), Clean Code, Code Complete

Re: Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

#250

Post by sashank_1509 »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #196
sashank_1509 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical sentiment I see that completely lacks any nuance. For one car vs IKEA are two completely different beasts entirely. A car opened up new avenues that a human could never do before its invention. This itself makes it a far more worthy invention than most. IKEA cheapened stuff and gave low quality cookie cutter furniture to everyone. Was this really a great thing, that propelled humanity forward? It’s also not l…

IKEA allowed people to afford decent quality furniture who otherwise couldn’t afford it. That’s a huge benefit in my view. Your “spend a bit more” is actually a huge amount for artisanal quality furniture. That’s how commodization has always worked. Something is suddenly available for the masses with maybe some loss of quality. Look at Excel. A lot of elitists look down on people doing complex stuff with it but in re…

IKEA is actually an example of a particularly horrible trade in this category. Claude estimates wood furniture price fell by 60% with IKEA. Plastic furniture on the other hand is 99% cheaper, far better at distributing furniture than IKEA ever will be.

So what did IKEA do, marginally cheaper furniture, complete destruction of demand for artisanal furniture (me alone buying some artisanal furniture is not propping up demand), apparently all our great wood workers should learn to code right now, but no worries LLM will code cheaper than them now, so maybe they should become YouTubers next.

And the particularly galling fact in this stupidity is the quality of the product is worse. Everyone now lives with worse furniture, the extra dollars they save, I guess they spend it on Netflix now, and we destroy a large avenue to express, human creativity, skill and craftsmanship for slightly cheaper furniture, lmao even. We will be perfectly fine with plastic furniture for the really poor, and higher quality more expensive hand crafted furniture for everyone else, they can maybe subscribe to Netflix less in return.

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