> when you build software, you own it No, I specifically don’t. My company owns it, and that bastard will lay me off without a second thought.
Yeah but only _you_ know what to do when your code breaks, ha ha.
AI-written code is still your code
31–40 of 99 posts
Re: AI-written code is still your code
#32I don't believe that AI is the 'higher level of abstraction[1]' that it is often claimed to be. However I wonder if it's possible to work with a codebase when other developers are treating AI as a higher level of abstraction. Analogously, people can write in assembly, but can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone with an optimizing compiler? [1] - Do higher levels of abstractions ev…
> can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone with an optimizing compiler
This itself is quite normal (e.g. we have .S files and .c files and link them together), but I suppose a more accurate analogy would be that someone is dumping their optimising compiler output directly into your .S files.
Maybe what we need is better ways to partition the slop-code and the not-slop code.
Re: AI-written code is still your code
#33> It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory. > I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI. I agree, and I've been thinking similarly. But I don't think there's anything "new" about what understandable and well-factored code should look like. It's the same principles as ever. A lot of a…
There are deterministically computable metrics for cognitive complexity and readability[0].
They’re not perfect by any means — and I suspect they’re already included in the RL process for coding evals, and have been for some time. I do think we’ll see ongoing improvement in this area though.
[0] (pdf warning) https://www.sonarsource.com/docs/CognitiveComplexity.pdf
Re: AI-written code is still your code
#34This is why I don't use AI to write code directly but instead will use it to generate code snippets or ideas or critique, or even just use it as documentation I can talk to.
By doing this I can still get the benefits of the technology including - and this is crucial - as a learning aid to improve my own skills, while not entirely outsourcing my own thinking to the machine.
Re: AI-written code is still your code
#35> I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI.
Why? Humans can't keep up. We can't keep up with writing the code, we can't keep up with debugging, and I think we're approaching a 'claude code' moment where we won't be able to keep up with system architecture.
Re: AI-written code is still your code
#36I'm fine with it. I'm just as liable or likely to write bugs in my own handwritten code as I am in generating code via AI, if not more likely.
My tiny two pet projects I keep developing with LLMs taught me how useful TDD is - I'm not a software engineer so I've been never formally introduced to these, but now I learn the best practices.
So in consequence I have less bugs in this code than what I could achieve myself, and as a second outcome of these is a solid workspace templates that make it faster and easier to get another small thing up to speed, the way that's good and "me". And the very short leash, sandbox and hooks make sure I learn a lot in the process too.
Re: AI-written code is still your code
#37I keep getting downvoted for saying this but I still review all of my AI generated code. I feel like I’m sufficiently sped up. Of course you can go faster if you don’t read the code at all, that’s always been true. But it seems like the ability to emit large quantities of text is already a huge leap in productivity. I don’t think these tools are good enough yet to offload all or our thinking into them.
IMO human-verifying will always be a must, no matter how good the LLMs get. If I'm shipping code that I don't understand and it ends up having major problems, I'm still the one who's responsible for it, not the LLM.
You could ship code without understanding it, it just needs to be treated as throwaway, unreliable and potentially malicious. This is OK for some tasks, e.g. best-effort scraping of a frequently updated website that's actively hostile to automation
Re: AI-written code is still your code
#38Yes I'm more than okay. AI has enabled a scale of personal ambition I could only previously have dreamed of. I've never been the kind of coder who could easily sit down and get their thoughts out from mind to written lines. I've seen that happen in a few gifted individuals, and AI might be frustrating them, because for them, coding was never the bottleneck, but for me, I would always get stuck in analysis paralysis,…
Way to completely miss the point of the article.
What was the point to you? What I took away from the article is that AI adds a bunch of complexity that is making it harder, not easier to understand.
And I'm saying that is true, but it's also enabling a kind of complexity and ambition in outcomes that might be a worthwhile trade-off.
In the same way we accept that cars are no longer something that a mechanic can understand and repair without a laptop, because we trade off the repairability and understanding for better mileage or safer handling.
Either I misunderstood the article, or people are misunderstanding my point, because I'm genuinely confused by being called a bot.
Re: AI-written code is still your code
#39You are responsible for your (robot's) output.
Re: AI-written code is still your code
#40I don't believe that AI is the 'higher level of abstraction[1]' that it is often claimed to be. However I wonder if it's possible to work with a codebase when other developers are treating AI as a higher level of abstraction. Analogously, people can write in assembly, but can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone with an optimizing compiler? [1] - Do higher levels of abstractions ev…
Sounds like you just don't like the phrase 'higher level'. To most people this is synonymous to 'powerful abstractions' and 'more ergonomic abstractions' in the sense that they allow us to think "at a higher level" - map instead of loop, objects instead of memory addresses and size, modules instead of gotos.