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AI-written code is still your code

martiansoftware.com

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Re: AI-written code is still your code

#91

Post by Kinrany »

croes wrote: post #83
Kinrany wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not too different for crediting e.g. a typewriter as the tool used to author the text. That is, not ridiculous, but not new.

I can prompt AI to create code I couldn’t write myself, I can hardly say that about a typewriter. It’s more like a calculator that does calculations I can’t do. Can you perform calculations involving roots and logarithms without a calculator? If not, do you claim YOU can calculate them?

You can write and calculate much faster with a typewriter and a calculator than you would do the same by hand, and you can use both even if you don't know handwriting or the algorithm for calculating logarithms by hand.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#92

Post by croes »

Kinrany wrote: post #91
croes wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can prompt AI to create code I couldn’t write myself, I can hardly say that about a typewriter. It’s more like a calculator that does calculations I can’t do. Can you perform calculations involving roots and logarithms without a calculator? If not, do you claim YOU can calculate them?

You can write and calculate much faster with a typewriter and a calculator than you would do the same by hand, and you can use both even if you don't know handwriting or the algorithm for calculating logarithms by hand.

But you need to know the spelling to write the correct words with the typewriter, you don’t need to know with AI if you use voice recognition. You need to know a programming language either to get a working program. If you can do everything AI can, then you can use it like a tool like a typewriter but given the fact that many people can’t do what AI does for them, AI is something different then a typewriter.

By your logic a secretary is something like a typewriter too.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#93

Post by jlawrence6809 »

daveguy wrote: post #86
jlawrence6809 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm a bad programmer or have worked at places with terrible dev culture, but honestly I've made changes to code I didn't really understand. The changes I made seemed to accomplish the task I was aiming at, but the downstream effects were sometimes impossible for me to grok. Before vibe coding took over, using AI to help me get a handle on what a bunch of code was doing was actually one of the things that sold m…

Yeah, I think AI is a great tool to get a handle on a codebase so you understand it. It's just a much more difficult task when that code is AI generated. I don't think agentic coding is worth all the overhead and complexity. Honestly think that as human understanding is prioritized agentic coding will decline. But I don't think human understanding will be prioritized until we see some major crash and burns with agent…

That's as good a guess about the future as any I suppose! Personally I'd give that about a 30% chance of happening in a large way. For small systems though I don't think I could ever personally go back to the old way. And maybe we should be composing small systems anyway...

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#94

Post by bitwizeshift »

altern8 wrote: post #6

I'm not OK with it, but I have no choice besides maybe quitting my job. I've also tried to understand the code that AI writes, but it's often insane and untangling it would slow me down so much that it would nullify the gains in speed that AI brings. To me, either companies realize they're spending a lot more money to ship crappier code and AI becomes a niche, or we'll just stop looking at code. I don't think there's…

There is an in between here that developers seem to keep forgetting: Design the software architecture yourself — do some whiteboarding, figure out your abstractions and your UML, then write that in your prompt for the LLM to implement through a plan.

Velocity stays high. Cognitive overhead remains low. You know enough of your architecture from the “unit” level to see how the pieces work meaning you can still work fast and understand it without hating the quality it produces. This has worked wonders for my company; I’ve managed to personally write tools that are barely distinguishable from what I’d write by hand, and I’m confident enough to discuss its architecture from top to bottom. If the LLM ever produces a unit with a poor implementation, I just rewrite that unit.

Basically: do the “engineering” part of software engineering instead of throwing LLMs at the wall until code sticks. It doesn’t take much time to come up with a good design, compared to repeatedly iterating on a bad design and maintaining it for years to come.

LLMs suck at design, and that’s why they lead to this bad code. But if a human spends an hour to build nice SOLID abstractions, and tell the LLM each responsibility — they are pretty good at using and wiring these parts together.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#95

Post by arw0n »

pringk02 wrote: post #87
altern8 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a bot, or real..?

I have started to wonder to what degree programming discussion online is astroturfed. The financial incentive to flood programming discussion (any discussion related to work) with pro-AI messaging, and the simultaneous ease with which AI makes it to do so, makes it hard not to ponder what amount of seemingly organic pro-AI sentiment is not. I'm sure there is some that is indeed genuine. It could even be most. But I'd…

The comment reads like flesh-generated language to me, but I might be fooled. The breadths of pro-AI sentiment is possibly astroturphed, but there's also an argument for an enthusiastic minority of people to write a lot more comments.

As the person above said, AI has significantly increased my ability to execute on ideas. I always liked computers, always liked building things, but was never that great at coding, and was never that good at going super deep into one topic. Instead, I have broad knowledge of a lot of things like product design, requirements engineering, devops, security.

I work with a fully agentic flow, but I would argue very seriously; My job has not gotten easier, I am doing at least as much hard thinking as before. From assisted RE over design (TDD focused Spec), implementation by agents, review by agents with partial human oversight, I have a speedup of maybe 50-100%.

More importantly, I can do things I couldn't do before. And when it comes to performance and defect-density, it is comparable to very senior people I couldn't touch before. I do agree that the code doesn't look like a human would write it - too abstracted, sometimes convoluted, often way too dense. But it isn't worse code, and if you accept that no one has to read that code ever again, then it is good. Agents are able to grok it just fine.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#96

Post by deterministic »

altern8 wrote: post #6

I'm not OK with it, but I have no choice besides maybe quitting my job. I've also tried to understand the code that AI writes, but it's often insane and untangling it would slow me down so much that it would nullify the gains in speed that AI brings. To me, either companies realize they're spending a lot more money to ship crappier code and AI becomes a niche, or we'll just stop looking at code. I don't think there's…

> I've also tried to understand the code that AI writes, but it's often insane and untangling it would slow me down

I hear that a lot, but it is very different from my experience using Claude Code every day. The code it generates is pretty much what I would have written myself. My colleagues have always said my code is easy to read and understand, so hopefully it is not just because my code is insane too :)

So I wonder: how are you using LLMs?

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#98

Post by vandopereira »

daveguy wrote: post #54
andincl wrote: post #34

This 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.

This is exactly how AI should be used when coding. "Agentic" AI produces garbage code. The entire codebase should never be accessible to the context (even if parts at a time, if the agent chooses the parts). And the entire codebase should never be write accessible. Only limited scope writes, human read, and approved.

ya thats why i built this tool called kaplira, after repeatedly seeing agents write to places it should never touch. now i have less regressions.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#99

Post by glouwbug »

gwbas1c wrote: post #30
delijati wrote: post #16

we will go full circle "what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans" maybe we invent a pseudo programming language so we get deterministic results ;)

I honestly have a vision of a database of .md files that fully describes an application in human-readable, (ok, engineer-readable), text. Making a change is committing a change to the human-readable text, and then AI comes and figures out the rest and/or suggests edits to the human-readable text. (Or asks questions.)

This is what Python was supposed to be
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