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AI code and software craft

alexwennerberg.com

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Re: AI code and software craft

#101

Post by dns_snek »

simplify wrote: post #59
acedTrex wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean yes, i am speaking for myself. I am drowning in mountains of LLM slop patches lol. I WISH people were using LLMs as "just another tool to generate code, akin to a vim vs emacs discussion."

LLMs are an amplifier. The great get greater, and the lazier get lazier.

I happen to think that's largely a self-delusion which nobody is immune to, no matter how smart you are (or think you are).

I've heard this from a few smart people whom I know really well. They strongly believe this, they also believe that most people are deluding themselves, but not them - they're in the actually-great group, and when I pointed out the sloppiness of their LLM-assisted work they wouldn't have any of it.

I'm specifically talking about experienced programmers who now let LLMs write majority of their code.

Re: AI code and software craft

#102

Post by ako »

I think we should embrace AI to craft better software. You have a lot of control over the code generated by AI, so all your designs, patterns, best practices can be used in the generated code. This will make us better software craftsmen.

A nice example is guitar building: there's a whole bunch of luthiers that stick to traditional methods to build guitars, or even just limit themselves to japanese woodworking tools.

But that is not the only way to build great guitars. It can be done by excellent luthiers, building high quality quitars with state of the art tools. For example Ulrich Teuffel who uses all sorts of high tech like CAD systems and CDC machines to craft beautiful guitars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLZOxwmcFVo and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLZOxwmcFVo

Unfortunately, craftsmanship does not come cheap, so most customers will turn to industrially created products. Same for software.

Re: AI code and software craft

#103

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

pjmlp wrote: post #98
basilgohar wrote: post #37

I feel like one of the things that's not said enough, and which I think is conflating the effectiveness of AI in the eyes of actual software engineers, is that, for the most part, most code produced IS lousy. The craft of programming has been watered down so much in favor of results, and so much code is disposable or write-and-use once, that quality just became less relevant. I remember when I first started out progr…

Indeed this is offshoring taken to the next level. Business doesn't care about the craft, they care that the use case is solved, even if the code is crap under the hood.

I will say that offshoring has developed a bad name; maybe not unreasonably. There’s some terrible outsourcing shops.

But there’s also a few that are really good. I know people that used Romanian and Polish shops that did great work. They weren’t super-cheap, but still cheaper than American contract developers.

I assume that the bad offshoring orgs are pretty nervous about AI. I also assume that the better ones are learning to incorporate AI as a force multiplier.

Interesting times, ahead…

Re: AI code and software craft

#104

Post by jfyi »

baroudi wrote: post #94

> But there are serious limits. [Your coding agent] will lie to you, they don't really understand things, and they often generate bad code. As for lies and bad code, it didn't appear with AI. Humans lied and produced bad code before AI. How does the author empirically know AI does not understand? And if it does not understand right now, is a machine fundamentally unable to understand? Is understanding an exclusive hu…

I have had an interesting experience just recently.

I hired back on at a company I used to work at and found they had contracted work to another former employee who was handed the code from a rest api I had written and a web app that used it. The task was to write an android app that interacted with the api.

He ran it through an agentic coding assistant and got out api scaffolding and basic UI.

Looking it over, I couldn't shake the feeling I was looking at my code, just ported to kotlin. I was seeing my idiosyncrasies everywhere. It was kind of surreal.

I was familiar with the dev's work who did it and it was nothing like his prior work, but it's been years since I have seen him, so who knows.

I couldn't help but admit it was a good foundation to start building on.

I told the pm they were likely overpaying significantly for an agentic coding assistant and only getting access to it for a few hours a month. This same organization recoiled in terror when I pointed out the cost of a claude code subscription once.

Re: AI code and software craft

#105

Post by [deleted] »

trollbridge wrote: post #62
fartfeatures wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure and lots of times I can walk places. That doesn't mean bikes, cars, trains and planes aren't incredibly useful. They let me achieve things I can't in other ways for example transporting cargo without a team of people to help me. Just like AI coding.

Yet replacing walking with cars is often cited as one of the reasons for many of society's ills.

[deleted]

Re: AI code and software craft

#106

Post by pjmlp »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #103
pjmlp wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed this is offshoring taken to the next level. Business doesn't care about the craft, they care that the use case is solved, even if the code is crap under the hood.

I will say that offshoring has developed a bad name; maybe not unreasonably. There’s some terrible outsourcing shops. But there’s also a few that are really good. I know people that used Romanian and Polish shops that did great work. They weren’t super-cheap, but still cheaper than American contract developers. I assume that the bad offshoring orgs are pretty nervous about AI. I also assume that the better ones are l…

They certainly are, https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/19/hcl_infosys_tcs_wipro...

We usually call that nearshore over here in Europe, exactly to differentiate the expectations of what gets delivered.

Re: AI code and software craft

#107

Post by ekidd »

dns_snek wrote: post #101
simplify wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are an amplifier. The great get greater, and the lazier get lazier.

I happen to think that's largely a self-delusion which nobody is immune to, no matter how smart you are (or think you are). I've heard this from a few smart people whom I know really well. They strongly believe this, they also believe that most people are deluding themselves, but not them - they're in the actually-great group, and when I pointed out the sloppiness of their LLM-assisted work they wouldn't have any of…

All on my own, I hand-craft pretty good code, and I do it pretty fast. But one person is finite, and the amount of software to write is large.

If you add a second, skilled programmer, just having two people communicating imperfectly drops quality to 90% of the base.

If I add an LLM instead, it drops to maybe 80% of my base quality. But it's still not bad. I'm reading the diffs. There are tests and fancy property tests and even more documentation explaining constraints that Claude would otherwise miss.

So the question is if I can get 2x the features at 80% of the quality, how does that 80% compare to what the engineering problem requires?

Re: AI code and software craft

#108

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ako wrote: post #102

I think we should embrace AI to craft better software. You have a lot of control over the code generated by AI, so all your designs, patterns, best practices can be used in the generated code. This will make us better software craftsmen. A nice example is guitar building: there's a whole bunch of luthiers that stick to traditional methods to build guitars, or even just limit themselves to japanese woodworking tools.…

But your comparison is a bit off; you mention CNC machines and the like to build guitars, but those are tools that are still exactly programmed by humans. LLMs on the other hand are probabilistic - you prompt "write me a set of gcode instructions for a CNC to build a guitar body" and wait / hope.

Sure, LLMs as a tool probably have a place in software development, but the danger lies in high volume, low oversight.

But there's people using it large scale to build large applications, time will tell how they work out in the end. Software engineering is programming over time, and the "over time" for LLM based software engineering hasn't been long enough yet.

Re: AI code and software craft

#109

Post by jappgar »

trollbridge wrote: post #62
fartfeatures wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure and lots of times I can walk places. That doesn't mean bikes, cars, trains and planes aren't incredibly useful. They let me achieve things I can't in other ways for example transporting cargo without a team of people to help me. Just like AI coding.

Yet replacing walking with cars is often cited as one of the reasons for many of society's ills.

Yet no one seriously declares motor vehicles as useless.

Re: AI code and software craft

#110

Post by Cthulhu_ »

acedTrex wrote: post #22
will__ness wrote: post #17

> But there are serious limits. [Your coding agent] will lie to you, they don't really understand things, and they often generate bad code. I think that really high quality code can be created via coding agents. Not in one prompt, but instead an orchestration of planning, implementing, validating, and reviewing. Its still engineering work. The code still matters. Its just a different tool to write the code. I'd compa…

> the end result is the same but the method is very different. I dont think anyone really cares at all about LLM code that is the exact same end result as the hand written version. It's just in reality the LLM version is almost never the same as the hand written version, it's orders of magnitude worse.

In the limited use cases I've used it, it's alright / good enough. But it has lots of examples (of my own) to work off of.
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