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Measuring the sloppiness of code

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Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#71

Post by Dlemlo »

avgDev wrote: post #43
scronkfinkle wrote: post #12

There is some sense of rose-tinted glasses of pre-LLM coding. A lot of human written code, particularly at the enterprise level, was of low quality well before AI automated it.

Writing code at enterprise level is insanely difficult. You are constrained by budget, staff, legacy databases/environments, business rules hiding all over the place, and people. You can't just rewrite everything. So over many years people are touching small parts of the pie. If it works it isn't low quality.

The code I have seen and see still, started shitty.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#72

Post by danbruc »

chucksmash wrote: post #57
danbruc wrote: post #19

Coding is not solved, correctness is not a feature, it is the bare minimum. If your code does not do what it is supposed to do, you could as well have no code at all. Efficiency, security, maintainability, reliability, readability, understandability, extensibility, maintainability, observability, portability, ... this is what high quality coding is about, not that it works, that is a given. And in my experience curre…

Correctness is not a binary thing though. I doubt many people here are brave enough to claim their code does what is supposed to do in every conceivable case. Maybe you have high confidence in the correctness of parts of the code. Correctness of an application is murky though. Things we build are never fully correct, merely correct enough. Like maybe you're responsible for the UI in a web app and you're using your ex…

Sure, every sufficiently large codebase will have bugs somewhere, but it will work correctly at least something like 99.999 % of the time after ironing out the bugs on the common code paths. But that does not change the fact that being [mostly] correct is the lowest bar you have to cross.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#74

Post by mr_roboto »

danbruc wrote: post #19

Coding is not solved, correctness is not a feature, it is the bare minimum. If your code does not do what it is supposed to do, you could as well have no code at all. Efficiency, security, maintainability, reliability, readability, understandability, extensibility, maintainability, observability, portability, ... this is what high quality coding is about, not that it works, that is a given. And in my experience curre…

You come across as someone who has never worked on a real software project. Humans create tons of bugs on a regular basis. AI is already better than most programmers.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#75

Post by shimman »

Retric wrote: post #53
shimman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was always due to pressures by management and the company environment, not the workers themselves. It's hard to blame the people writing code when they have to deal with nontechnical leadership that wants to have a feature factory or never given appropriate resources to solve problems. Blaming workers is always an excuse by poor management.

Many people were and still are simply terrible developers. Hand those people an LLM and they don’t suddenly become competent, but they do start slinging more code.

Nah, you're still blaming workers and not leadership. If leadership is okay with not training workers (something American corporations would do in the distant past) then it's not fair to continue to blame workers when leadership is clearly aware of the problem and would rather pocket the money than help workers.

These companies pay management more than workers for a reason, if you can't even admit that they are to blame then what are you trying to do here? Just attack workers for what reason exactly? Being anti-worker is a great tell to never trust a person.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#76

Post by harshalizee »

avgDev wrote: post #43
scronkfinkle wrote: post #12

There is some sense of rose-tinted glasses of pre-LLM coding. A lot of human written code, particularly at the enterprise level, was of low quality well before AI automated it.

Writing code at enterprise level is insanely difficult. You are constrained by budget, staff, legacy databases/environments, business rules hiding all over the place, and people. You can't just rewrite everything. So over many years people are touching small parts of the pie. If it works it isn't low quality.

Yeah, enterprise code has that trope of being enterprise-y, verbose and bad. In my experience, that has always been the opposite. At the big corps/FAANGs I worked at, a single line of change can adversely impact millions of paying customers, so a lot of the verbosity and harnesses exists to dampen the failure modes. Most of the terribly written stuff has always been at startups, where devs fling nearly anything across the finish line, if it barely works the happy path.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#77

Post by [deleted] »

danbruc wrote: post #19

Coding is not solved, correctness is not a feature, it is the bare minimum. If your code does not do what it is supposed to do, you could as well have no code at all. Efficiency, security, maintainability, reliability, readability, understandability, extensibility, maintainability, observability, portability, ... this is what high quality coding is about, not that it works, that is a given. And in my experience curre…

[deleted]

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#79

Post by bunderbunder »

scronkfinkle wrote: post #12

There is some sense of rose-tinted glasses of pre-LLM coding. A lot of human written code, particularly at the enterprise level, was of low quality well before AI automated it.

I'm not so sure that's a fair comparison.

So much "bad" enterprise code evolved into that state over years or even decades of small changes. Meanwhile, last year I got to watch an LLM-authored codebase speedrun itself into a similar state in only a couple months. And I would say that the enterprise code was actually better. It at least did its job fairly reliably. The LLM codebase was riddled with defects, so much so that it ate up all our time and our feature delivery rate ground to a halt.

There are two observations that really eat at me:

1. Studies seem to indicate that agentic coding uses 2-10x as many lines of code to accomplish the same task.

2. One of the only really well-established empirical results in software engineering is the strong association between LOC and defect rate.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#80

Post by OtomotO »

mr_roboto wrote: post #74
danbruc wrote: post #19

Coding is not solved, correctness is not a feature, it is the bare minimum. If your code does not do what it is supposed to do, you could as well have no code at all. Efficiency, security, maintainability, reliability, readability, understandability, extensibility, maintainability, observability, portability, ... this is what high quality coding is about, not that it works, that is a given. And in my experience curre…

You come across as someone who has never worked on a real software project. Humans create tons of bugs on a regular basis. AI is already better than most programmers.

AI is the average of all programmers.

It's just that many (I guess that includes me? :D) assumed that they are better than the actually were.

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