Live data from Hacker News

Redis array: short story of a long development process

antirez.com

111–118 of 118 posts

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#111
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simon often says that its LLMs help him "write productive code", but most of the code he shows are python libs doing menial tasks. That's fine for tooling, etc, which is sometimes useful. It would absolutely NOT work for production-code with critical concurrency / embedded / real-time stuff

Antirez wrote Redis. That is "production-code with critical concurrency" To quote another of his posts: > I fixed transient failures in the Redis test. This is very annoying work, timing related issues, TCP deadlock conditions, and so forth. Claude Code iterated for all the time needed to reproduce it, inspected the state of the processes to understand what was happening, and fixed the bugs. ... > In the past weeks I…

His summarized assessment from that very post: "...state of the art LLMs are able to complete large subtasks or medium size projects alone, almost unassisted, given a good set of hints about what the end result should be. The degree of success you'll get is related to the kind of programming you do (the more isolated, and the more textually representable, the better: system programming is particularly apt), and to your ability to create a mental representation of the problem to communicate to the LLM."

He's saying you should be writing up complex, highly detailed specs for the LLM to turn into code, stressing that it's critical to work in a self-contained and "textually representable" problem domain. This is not one-shotting complete products from a vague prompt. You're still going to need software architects, and they'll still be doing much the same work. Turning fully-specified design into code has never been a "10x" task, it was always regarded as a relatively straightforward, if often tricky part of the job. And the way he worked with Redis makes it clear that you can't take what the AI delivers at face value, either: you'll have to go through it yourself, and that will take time and effort.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#112

Redis wants to get in on the vector database market that is popular in AI. That is all there is to it. That is the reason why the Redis author keeps boosting AI. To the point where he even uses Redis to demonstrate how many bugs AI has found. Not every software is as buggy as Redis. It is all an advertisement by someone extremely adept at manipulating techies.

There’s already a full text search module for redis so your uncharitable characterization isn’t really valid.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#113
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simon often says that its LLMs help him "write productive code", but most of the code he shows are python libs doing menial tasks. That's fine for tooling, etc, which is sometimes useful. It would absolutely NOT work for production-code with critical concurrency / embedded / real-time stuff

Antirez wrote Redis. That is "production-code with critical concurrency" To quote another of his posts: > I fixed transient failures in the Redis test. This is very annoying work, timing related issues, TCP deadlock conditions, and so forth. Claude Code iterated for all the time needed to reproduce it, inspected the state of the processes to understand what was happening, and fixed the bugs. ... > In the past weeks I…

First he didn't write Redis with LLMs, it was way before. Second I'm not speaking of him in that comment.

Also his whole blog is about how, in order to do a task, he would need to spec it properly, then do "code inpainting" with the LLM, then fix all the issues that he could spot only because he's a senior, then repeat, etc

Did you read it?

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#114

Redis wants to get in on the vector database market that is popular in AI. That is all there is to it. That is the reason why the Redis author keeps boosting AI. To the point where he even uses Redis to demonstrate how many bugs AI has found. Not every software is as buggy as Redis. It is all an advertisement by someone extremely adept at manipulating techies.

Nice try. User created 2 hours ago just to speculative shtpost without evidence.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#116

Sharing my current MO: I start with a high level design md doc which an AI helps write. Then I ask another AI - whether the same model without the context, or another model - to critique it and spot bugs, gaps and omissions. It always finds obvious in hindsight stuff. So I ask it to summarize its findings and I paste that into the first AI and ask its opinions. We form an agreed change and make it and carry on this a…

Love it and used a similar approach to vibe a core banking application for a mid-tier US bank with ~$10B+ in assets. They plan to put it in to production soon. That said, I felt held back by the rest of the org. the entire time because they continue to work the old way...we could have delivered it in a fraction of time and cost.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#117
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developer of 20+ years here, can't give you an accurate multiplier but I am faster. Because spotting holes in specs has never been one of my strengths. And working without technical colleagues much of the time, it's a boon to be able to "rubber-duck" my ideas with something that is at least more intelligent than plastic. Grabbing multipliers from thin air, the coding bit may only be 2x faster with a poorer-quality ou…

I actually use LLMs a lot to rubber duck my problems and help develop plans. Then I manually code, to ensure my skills don't deteriorate. I feel like I'm a lot faster, with few of the downsides. Do you have any thoughts on this process?

That's my take as well, I find fixing poor/overengineered LLM code taxing.

Re: Redis array: short story of a long development process

#118
post #59

Got few questions: - the project essentially spans almost 3 different (albeit minor) generations of LLMs. Have you noticed major differences in their personas, behavior, output for that specific use case? - when using AI for feedback, have you ever considered giving it different "personalities"? I have few skills that role play as very different reviewers with their own different (by design conflicting) personalities…

1. The huge jump from from Opus to GPT 5.3. Game changer. GPT 5.4, 5.5, were better but only incrementally better. 2. Nope I don't give much personalities, but I use subtle prompt differences to maximize certain responses I want, to make the model focusing in a given detail or acting in a specific kind of engineering mindset. 3. It never happened that the AI was slowing me down since I always had the full context and…

Ha. I use the letter thing as well. I make it address it to a Mr. Chad G Petey. Only I maintain it for posterity in project/letters and project/letters/responses.
Post reply on HN