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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

#191
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, I can't say exactly what but the backbone of cloud computing and/or infra, think databases, distributed storage, filesystems, ...

I mean, AWS did just recently go down due to a vibe-coding / agent-run-amuck incident, didn’t it?

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanics I've been to generally have no idea about how things actually in the car work - from what I could understand, area is full of recurring problems, and this exactly benefits mechanics to solve them through trial and error approach rather than understanding much how underlying things work. Pretty much close to what I would say SWE will turn into, there's no other choice IMO in foreseeable future.

I think you underestimate the skill of more experienced mechanics. Tractor (as in 18 wheeler) and master mechanics tend to know what’s going on under the hood in detail.

Like what exactly?

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I can't say exactly what but the backbone of cloud computing and/or infra, think databases, distributed storage, filesystems, ...

I mean, AWS did just recently go down due to a vibe-coding / agent-run-amuck incident, didn’t it?

I don't know which one exactly but can we now count how many incidents there were in the pre-agent era?

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

#194
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lint rules, type errors, commit lint, anything These are basic: they work for human coders and are typically quick to setup. But gates at this level are far from enough for agentic coding. You need an extensive test suite/e2e suite/benchmark suite. Typically much larger than the code base itself: This is what enables those "i ported bun to rust in a weekend" headlines. Where ever such extensive 'gates', high qualit…

I mean, from my training long ago, a good test suite is usually / always a few multiples in size of the codebase. 100k lines of app code? 300-500k lines of test, sort of thing.

Exactly.

I am now looking at 9 to 10x the app code, for non trivial stuff. And this is not just the usual unit/integration/e2e suites too. Extensive deadcode, field use, code shape tests (ast walking) - god objects, 15-param helpers, wrapper-piled-upon-wrapper, badly named (a skill) functions/methods/objects, path-dependent artifacts, etc. There is no way I could have written all this manually.

It doesn't guarentee high quality OR reliability or readability or maintainability, but does reduce churn and makes me feel a bit more confident about deploying route A work product in prod.

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

#196
post #59

> It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI Yes! And that's because you can't really delegate ownership/authorship to AI (at today's capability levels). Coding agents might have been RL'd out the wazoo to write code to solve well defined problems, but given a situation the onus of making sense of the ambiguity and identifying the problem -- and even crafting a skeleton for an accept…

You really put my thoughts into words, thank you!

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

#198
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can become a harness, like a lot of us.

Well that gives dying in harness a whole new meaning.

Come join us https://xff.cz/

We still have 80 slots open for ambient presence harness position. It's one of the easiest and filling out fast.

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

#199

i've been dabbling with various assistant models and instances and find that there's an interesting "idea" that pops up from their synthesis and relevancy analysis at a decent frequency. some kind of "inverse prompting" in which the machine has an angle, perspective, opportunity (based on the context it's working with/in) and the human turns those seedlings into something useful... or else decides its weed to be disc…

The prompter becomes the prompted!

ha indeed!

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

#200
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lint rules, type errors, commit lint, anything These are basic: they work for human coders and are typically quick to setup. But gates at this level are far from enough for agentic coding. You need an extensive test suite/e2e suite/benchmark suite. Typically much larger than the code base itself: This is what enables those "i ported bun to rust in a weekend" headlines. Where ever such extensive 'gates', high qualit…

I mean, from my training long ago, a good test suite is usually / always a few multiples in size of the codebase. 100k lines of app code? 300-500k lines of test, sort of thing.

Tests are also a good mechanical and deterministic guardrails, but they're written by the same AI that wrote the code then what's the difference?
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