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Measuring the sloppiness of code

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Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#171

Post by dang »

_s_a_m_ wrote: post #59
echelon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all of these things will be solved one by one. It's astounding to me that people can see coding get solved and not think every single one of these tasks won't be solved too. Why do you not think these things aren't going to be completely automated? What makes these tasks special? Fable and Astra can one-shot video games with compelling novel game loops. They can do systems programming, distributed systems, roboti…

[flagged]

Personal attacks will get you banned here. No more of this, please, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#172

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

#173

Post by dang »

All: please don't post generic reflexive reactions to titles. That's covered by this guideline, among others, in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

I've taken the provocative bit out of the title above, but please remember that we want reflective comments, not reflexive ones, in HN threads.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#174

Post by rayiner »

Is coding "solved?" I've been using Fable and Grok to vibecode a library to improve text extraction for legal PDFs. (Which have things like line numbers in transcripts that messes up text extraction.) This is a simple, dumb problem that should be like killing a mouse with a nuke. But I got to "pretty good" with a few iterations of not looking at the code or design. The program works, pretty well. But the design and heuristics are only 80% of the way there. Now, the models are just "churning" on the existing design, making ad hoc changes struggling to get to the last 20%. It seems like I'm going to have to turn my brain back on and think about what I actually want to do, which I was trying to avoid.

It's better than writing assembly! But it still seems to be in the realm of "a new kind of tool" even for the actual coding part, without even caring about what the code looks like or security or anything like that.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#175

Post by clem »

baridbelmedar wrote: post #35
softwaredoug wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt that. But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping. And IMO you get your best understanding by actually writing some code. Even if you don't actually ship what you wrote.

Let’s not romanticize it too much... A lot of enterprise systems are built by developers copying an old AbstractBeanFactoryFactory from a 2011 stack overflow thread without really understanding it :)

And which, in turn, was used to train LLMs without any guidance as to whether it's "good" or "bad" code.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#176

Post by queenkjuul »

ramijames wrote: post #42
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.

Not "a lot of". "The majority of". I've been doing development, in one way or another, since the 90s. I've worked with dozens of teams from enterprises to startups. Hundreds of developers. The quality of work has been all over the place, but the majority was not great. I'm arguing that what people today call "AI slop" is already higher quality than what most developers created historically, and the fact that tests an…

AI documentation is practically worthless ime. I forbid it in my projects. It's almost always more useful to not have any documentation and read the code than to rely on AI docs.

Testing though I'll mostly give you

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#177

Post by queenkjuul »

thr1owaway9621 wrote: post #115
ramijames wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "a lot of". "The majority of". I've been doing development, in one way or another, since the 90s. I've worked with dozens of teams from enterprises to startups. Hundreds of developers. The quality of work has been all over the place, but the majority was not great. I'm arguing that what people today call "AI slop" is already higher quality than what most developers created historically, and the fact that tests an…

This is off-topic, but I strongly dislike AI written documentation. When I see AI house style my eyes glaze over. Just this morning I reviewed an RFC from a colleague that he said was a spec for a web service. The document had no introduction, no context, it described endpoints for 2 distinctly different services instead of 1, and made no effort to reconcile why there are 2. It was scattershot with details, some of t…

Oh man, the "unit tests" that test whether the framework/browser/language is doing what it's supposed to drive me insane. Those have their own tests already! Test the unit under test, that's why it's called that!

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#178

Post by queenkjuul »

greenowl wrote: post #111
Varelion wrote: post #13

Coding is solved, but AI companies are still hiring software engineers?

Are they really though? And if so, how much of that is due to the hyper growth in this specific space? Meanwhile, the SWE job market across all companies seems pretty rough right now. Talk to someone looking for a job. Most companies seem to be in a holding pattern - little to no new SWE positions available.

The job market sucks for absolutely everyone right now, it's not a SWE thing. Fwiw I've had five recruiters reach out to me in the last four months and I'm not even applying places.

It's a far cry from 2021-2022 but I'm not convinced it's worse for SWEs today than it is for everyone else

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#179

Post by Terr_ »

ahalay-mahalay wrote: post #65
zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is very well put and summarizes what distinguishes real software development from vibe coding.

I’m pretty sure that same discourse was seen every mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics. Yet here we are, hand-crafted high quality things are rare and expensive.

> mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics

I see this comparison a lot, and I think it's a trap, because it invites us to confuse scaling duplicates with scaling design changes.

Duplicative mass-production was always core to software from the moment it first became "soft". A factory churning out 10,000 copies of the same book maps to 10,000 downloads of a single software release. The paper and bindings of the book may be below hand-crafted standards, but the words are largely unaffected.

In contrast, LLM-coding is the design and prototyping stage. So if we want to learn from textiles/electronics, we shouldn't be thinking of acres of looms, but instead about fashion-design, custom tailoring, determining patterns for clothes, designing new appliances, choosing circuit layouts, etc.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#180

Post by shimman »

ndriscoll wrote: post #102
shimman wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bl…

We're talking about professionals here. People who (at least in the US) often make several multiples of the median worker. Competence is assumed, and every company I've been at has had programs to pay for additional school if the employee wants it. IIRC at least one had an explicit book allowance, and I don't doubt that I could expense books right now if I asked. Do surgeons and lawyers complain so regularly that man…

There is no professional developer in the US. There are no licensing requirements to write code. There are no repercussions against developers that write code that immiserate or kill Americans. The person slinging wordpress plugins at an agency is equivalent to the person writing malware at Meta in the eyes of the government.

No one is training us because there are no regulations in our industry. Sorry but I still reject the premise of the other poster.

Also yes, in other industries professionals do complain when they aren't given their mandated time to learn while working on the job.

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