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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

lalitm.com

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#111

Post by throwaway47001 »

I appreciate these kind of fact-based posts. Thank you for this.

Unfortunately, AI seems to be divisive. I hope we will find our way back eventually. I believe the lessons from this era will reverberate for a long time and all sides stand to learn something.

As for me, I can’t help but notice there is a distinct group of developers that does not get it. I know because they are my colleagues. They are good people and not unintelligent, but they are set in their ways. I can imagine management forcing them to use AI, which at the moment is not the case, because they are such laggards. Even I sometimes want to “confront” them about their entire day wasted on something even the free ChatGPT would have handled adequately in a minute or two. It’s sad to see actually.

We are not doing important things and we ourselves are not geniuses. We know that or at least I know that. I worry for the “regular” developer, the one that is of average intellect like me. Lacking some kind of (social) moat I fear many of us will not be able to ride this one out into retirement.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#112

Post by suzzer99 »

dirtbag__dad wrote: post #45

> Tests created a similar false comfort. Having 500+ tests felt reassuring, and AI made it easy to generate more. But neither humans nor AI are creative enough to foresee every edge case you’ll hit in the future; there are several times in the vibe-coding phase where I’d come up with a test case and realise the design of some component was completely wrong and needed to be totally reworked. This was a significant con…

I've always thought that writing good tests (unit, integration or e2e) is harder than the actual coding by maybe an order of magnitude.

The tricky part of unit tests is coming up with creative mocks and ways to simulate various situations based on the input data, w/o touching the actual code.

For integration tests, it's massaging the test data and inputs to hit every edge case of an endpoint.

For e2e tests, it's massaging the data, finding selectors that aren't going to break every time the html is changed, and trying to winnow down to the important things to test - since exhaustive e2e tests need hours to run and are a full-time job to maintain. You want to test all the main flows, but also stuff like handling a back-end system failure - which doesn't get tested in smoke tests or normal user operations.

That's a ton of creativity for AI to handle. You pretty much have to tell it every test and how to build it.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#113

Post by megous »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #64
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

I'm deeply convinced that there's 2 reasons we don't see real takes like this: 1) is because these people are quietly appreciating the 2-50% uplift you get from sanely using LLMs instead of constantly posting sycophantic or doomer shit for clout and/or VC financing. 2) is because the real version of LLM coding is boring and unsexy. It either involves generating slop in one shot to POC, then restarting from scratch fo…

It can be any number of things. From spending hour or two just writing requirements, to giving an example of existing curated code from another project you wrote and would like to emulate, or rewriting existing apps in a different language/architecture (sort of like translating), to serving as a QA agent or reviewer for the LLM agent, or vice versa.

I kinda like how you can just use it for anything you like. I have bazillion personal projects, I can now get help with, polish up, simplify, or build UI for, and it's nice. Anything from reverse engineering, to data extraction, to playing with FPGAs, is just so much less tedious and I can focus on the fun parts.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#114

Post by suzzer99 »

bytefish wrote: post #103

This resonates with my experience. I have several Open Source projects and wanted to refactor them for a decade. A week ago I sat down with Google Gemini and completely refactored three of my libraries. It has been an amazing experience. What’s a game changer for me is the feedback loop. I can quickly validate or invalidate ideas, and land at an API I would enjoy to use.

Did you already have good integration tests?

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#115

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

[deleted]

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#116

Post by szundi »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #29
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

Agree. This is such a good balanced article. The only things that still make the insights difficult to apply to professional software development are: this was greenfield work and it was a solo project. But that’s hardly the author’s fault. It would however be fantastic to see more articles like this about how to go all in on AI tools for brownfield projects involving more than one person. One thing I will add: I act…

[dead]

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#118

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #100
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

For me it’s just a matter of “does this actually save me time at all?” If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead? How much money have I wasted in tokens?

A car saves you time in getting to and from the store. But if you don't learn to drive, and just hop in the car and press things, you're going to crash, and that definitely won't save you time. Cars are also more expensive than walking or a bike, yet people still buy them.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#120

Post by argee »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #29
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

Agree. This is such a good balanced article. The only things that still make the insights difficult to apply to professional software development are: this was greenfield work and it was a solo project. But that’s hardly the author’s fault. It would however be fantastic to see more articles like this about how to go all in on AI tools for brownfield projects involving more than one person. One thing I will add: I act…

This wasn't even just greenfield work, it included the exact type of work where AI arguably excels: extracting working code from an extant codebase (SQLite) as a reusable library. (It also included the type of work AI is really bad at: designing APIs sensibly.)
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