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It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

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Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#171

Post by fortzi »

menaerus wrote: post #146
t-writescode wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? You own the pager, I assume. You own the mental hit when something you let go live (especially with your name on the PR) leaks customer data or deleted someone’s work. And if you’re not reading your own work, is someone else during the PR? Are you reading other people’s PRs? How do you know what your product does and how it does it?

When the combustion engine was invented, and we got the means by which we could accelerate our trip by 10x, and at the same time scale it to multiple people, we didn't tell the humans to keep pushing the vehicles by their hands, didn't we?

As a developer you are more akin to a car mechanic, who’s still expected to know how the engine works even a century after it was invented, rather than a driver, who is just the user in this parallel.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#172

Post by fortzi »

menaerus wrote: post #142
cs02rm0 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, I admit that I'm finally getting into this "let Claude help you write code" stuff, and I'm enjoying it a bit for the stuff I, honestly, just don't want to write; but ... I still read it. I still review it. I still look at the code like I'm peer-reviewing it and go, "Uh ... I don't like this area at all. That's going to be really hard to debug at 3am" and so on. I used to. I've stopped in recent months, only bec…

Exactly. That would mean going back to square one, and I also personally don't review the code anymore but I am more focused on asking the model to demonstrate the value it created through benchmarks, workload-generators, and e2e tests. Mostly it proves as a valid approach, barring the bugs the model can introduce to value-demonstrating benchmarks which can of course skew the evidence on hypotheses, and thus code tra…

Are you working on complex systems that serve many users in production? Do you actually save time?

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#173

Post by fortzi »

voakbasda wrote: post #165
qsera wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you take responsibility for the architecture and instruct it to do things properly it will do them properly. The problem here is that after a while it is impossible to detect when such potential abstractions is overlooked in the generated code. Because it has become hard to reason about the existing code. Not all work is green field.

I have wondered about this. Can’t you ask the AI to find the patterns than need abstracting?

Yes you can. Sometimes it’ll find them, sometimes it won’t.

I find myself having to use Claude to untangle its own mess piece by piece, a as it charged full steam ahead with the design we made together. However, not everything can be foreseen in a design, unless you go full waterfall. Sometimes I find myself in front of a mountain of bad abstractions stemming from a subtle oversight in the design. Before AI coding, I would find details while coding and catch them in time before they became sinful abominations

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#174

Post by devmor »

unleaded wrote: post #91
notsirius wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'd probs want a commit hook for that

Does "don't write comments" not work?

It’ll work sometimes.

You’re using a non-deterministic algorithm to generate output. If you want deterministic rules applied to it, you have to use deterministic systems to do it.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#175

Post by othmanosx »

ghoul2 wrote: post #154
t-writescode wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I admit that I'm finally getting into this "let Claude help you write code" stuff, and I'm enjoying it a bit for the stuff I, honestly, just don't want to write; but ... I still read it. I still review it. I still look at the code like I'm peer-reviewing it and go, "Uh ... I don't like this area at all. That's going to be really hard to debug at 3am" and so on. I guess my thought / question is: this is your code.…

The problem, in my experience is: 1. It writes SO MUCH code, in minutes, that theres no way I as a human can review it. 2. I am not very motivated to read/review this code anyway: it was cheaply written, by some _thing_ that is not going to improve from my feedback. 3. If you DO review it conscientiously , it becomes a never ending thing: you keep finding issue upon issue. 4. If you report the issues for fixes, the f…

You should be the one building the gates then, but those gates should be mechanical and deterministic so the AI doesn’t wprk around them. Lint rules, type errors, commit lint, anything that tells the AI to stop instead of allowing workarounds.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#176

Post by anon373839 »

t-writescode wrote: post #168
ghoul2 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, in my experience is: 1. It writes SO MUCH code, in minutes, that theres no way I as a human can review it. 2. I am not very motivated to read/review this code anyway: it was cheaply written, by some _thing_ that is not going to improve from my feedback. 3. If you DO review it conscientiously , it becomes a never ending thing: you keep finding issue upon issue. 4. If you report the issues for fixes, the f…

Route A seems genuinely horrifying to me - maybe not for small and/or helper scripts; but for anything substantial. For anything that bites you or someone else hard when things go bad. I don’t want a vibe-coded, mass-produced diabetes tracking app, or banking tool, or tax management software. I don’t want a vibe-coded power grid analysis software. I don’t care if a person’s little, local scripting thing is vibe-coded…

Route A is good for rapid, disposable prototyping. If you ever have a stray thought, “I wonder how this would work if the whole paradigm were turned sideways”, you now have a chance to preview a “working” version of your idea. If you like it, discard the code and reimplement it correctly. In this way, I think it can be a good adjunct to sketches and other lofi prototyping techniques. Just don’t outsource the creative ideation to the LLM, because all you’ll get are the same solutions as everyone else.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#177

Post by Izkata »

t-writescode wrote: post #143
cs02rm0 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, I admit that I'm finally getting into this "let Claude help you write code" stuff, and I'm enjoying it a bit for the stuff I, honestly, just don't want to write; but ... I still read it. I still review it. I still look at the code like I'm peer-reviewing it and go, "Uh ... I don't like this area at all. That's going to be really hard to debug at 3am" and so on. I used to. I've stopped in recent months, only bec…

Why? You own the pager, I assume. You own the mental hit when something you let go live (especially with your name on the PR) leaks customer data or deleted someone’s work. And if you’re not reading your own work, is someone else during the PR? Are you reading other people’s PRs? How do you know what your product does and how it does it?

From what I understand for most people it isn't a conscious choice, it happens slowly over time. People naturally don't want to waste time, the code is there and if you don't look too closely it works, so they start skimming instead of going in-depth, expecting anything majorly wrong to pop out. But those things probably won't because generated code is very good at looking extremely high quality at a surface level no matter how bad it actually is. So eventually even the skimming starts feeling like a waste of time so it tapers off too.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#178

Post by Izkata »

qsera wrote: post #157
sfn42 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that happens when you vibe code and just let the LLM be in control of everything. If you take responsibility for the architecture and instruct it to do things properly it will do them properly. You can tell it exactly how to do it or you can ask it to handle it in a way that avoids duplication, you can tell it to design a reusable abstraction for this usecase etc.

>If you take responsibility for the architecture and instruct it to do things properly it will do them properly. The problem here is that after a while it is impossible to detect when such potential abstractions is overlooked in the generated code. Because it has become hard to reason about the existing code. Not all work is green field.

My personal suspicion is that a lot of preexisting codebases are running on inertia. The abstractions exist and are used well so the generated code also uses it most of the time, with only occasional breaks to the abstraction that look like an acceptable tradeoff in isolation. But those would keep piling up to where the existing abstraction is no longer so identifiable and that's where the major spaghetti code issues start happening.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#179

Post by t-writescode »

anon373839 wrote: post #176
t-writescode wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Route A seems genuinely horrifying to me - maybe not for small and/or helper scripts; but for anything substantial. For anything that bites you or someone else hard when things go bad. I don’t want a vibe-coded, mass-produced diabetes tracking app, or banking tool, or tax management software. I don’t want a vibe-coded power grid analysis software. I don’t care if a person’s little, local scripting thing is vibe-coded…

Route A is good for rapid, disposable prototyping. If you ever have a stray thought, “I wonder how this would work if the whole paradigm were turned sideways”, you now have a chance to preview a “working” version of your idea. If you like it, discard the code and reimplement it correctly. In this way, I think it can be a good adjunct to sketches and other lofi prototyping techniques. Just don’t outsource the creative…

Have you seen many of the replies in this thread and others? They’re not doing that. They’re putting it into production code. Their company’s thought leaders are trying to say that review itself is a waste of time, etc.

That’s not “disposable prototyping” that’s whole versions of the codebase written with barely a human in sight.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#180

Post by andrekandre »

parineum wrote: post #45
ModernMech wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate goal of project capitalism is to make ownership the only thing in the world that’s valued or valuable. The only thing that matters is how much and who you own.

The actual goal of capitalism is the direct the impulses of the capitalist to align with the interests of the public.

marketing dept says hello...
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