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AI makes tech debt more expensive

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Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#151

Post by mywittyname »

mandevil wrote: post #74
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only to spend the next year systematically restoring most of those pieces of complexity as whoever was on pager duty that week got to experience a high-pressure object lesson in why some design quirk of the original existed in the first place. Just to emphasize the point: even if it's not obvious why there is a line of code, it should at least be obvious that the line of code does something. It's important to find…

In my refactoring I always refer to that as Chesterton's Fence. Never remove something until you know why it was put in in the first place. Plenty of times it's because you were trying to support Python 3.8 or something else obsolete, and a whole lot of the time it's because you thought that the next project was going to be X so you tried to make that easy but X never got done so you have code to nowhere. Then feel f…

This can be a huge road block. Even if the developer who wrote the code is still around, there's no telling if they will even remember writing that line, or why they did so. But in most projects, that original developer is going to be long gone.

I leave myself notes when I do bug fixes for this exact reason.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#152

Post by PaulHoule »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #150
PaulHoule wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I “think different” and use Windows. I use Microsoft Copilot and would say it is qualitatively similar to codeium in quality, a real quantitative eval would be a lot of work.

Cursor (cursor.com) is just a vscode wrapper, should work fine with Windows. If you're already in the AI coding space I seriously urge you to at least give it a go.

I'll look into it.

I'll add that my experience with the Codium plugin for IntelliJ is night and day different from the Windsurf editor from Codium.

The first one "just doesn't work" and struggles to see files that are in my project, the second basically works.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#153

Post by MarcelOlsz »

PaulHoule wrote: post #152
MarcelOlsz wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor (cursor.com) is just a vscode wrapper, should work fine with Windows. If you're already in the AI coding space I seriously urge you to at least give it a go.

I'll look into it. I'll add that my experience with the Codium plugin for IntelliJ is night and day different from the Windsurf editor from Codium. The first one "just doesn't work" and struggles to see files that are in my project, the second basically works.

You can also look into https://www.greptile.com/ to ask codebase questions. There's so many AI coding tools out there now. I've heard good things about https://codebuddy.ca/ as well (for IntelliJ) and https://www.continue.dev/ (also for IntelliJ).

>The first one "just doesn't work"

Haha. You're on a roll.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#155

Post by nicce »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #8

> However, in ‘high-debt’ environments with subtle control flow, long-range dependencies, and unexpected patterns, they struggle to generate a useful response I'd argue that a lot of this is not "tech debt" but just signs of maturity in a codebase. Real world business requirements don't often map cleanly onto any given pattern. Over time codebases develop these "scars", little patches of weirdness. It's often temptin…

> Over time codebases develop these "scars", little patches of weirdness. It's often tempting for the younger, less experienced engineer to declare this as tech debt or cruft or whatever, and that a full re-write is needed. Only to re-learn the lessons those scars taught in the first place.

Do you have an opinion when this maturity is too mature?

Let's say, you would need to add a major feature that would drastically change the existing code base. On top of that, by changing the language, this major feature would be effortless to add.

When it is worth to fight with scars or just rewrite?

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#156

Post by [deleted] »

munk-a wrote: post #111
madeofpalk wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is the opposite - I find large blobs of generated code to be daunting, so I tend to pretty quickly reject them and either write something smaller by hand, or reprompt (in one way for another) for less, easier to review code.

You are an excellent user of AI code generation - but your habit is absolutely not the norm and other developers will throw in paragraphs of AI slop mindlessly.

[deleted]

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#157

Post by yawnxyz »

davidsainez wrote: post #134
yawnxyz wrote: post #121

I find AI most helpful with very specific, narrow commands (add a new variable to the logger, which means typescript and a bunch of other things need to be updated) and it can go off and do that. While it's doing that I'll be thinking about the next thing to be fixed already. Asking it for higher level planning / architecture is just asking for pain

Current gen AI is bad at high level planning. But I've found it useful in iterating on my ideas, sort of a rubberduck++. It helps to have a system prompt that is not overly agreeable

yes! It's definitely talked out of making some really dumb decisions

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#158

Post by unregistereddev »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #17
vander_elst wrote: post #2

"Companies with relatively young, high-quality codebases" I thought that at the beginning the code might be a bit messy because there is the need to iterate fast and quality comes with time, what's the experience of the crowd on this?

I find messiness often comes from capturing every possible edge case that a young codebase probably doesn’t do tbh. A user deleted their account and there’s now a request to register that account with that username? We didn’t think of that (concerns from ux on imposter and abuse to be handled). Better code in a catch and handle this. Do this 100x times and you code has 100x custom branching logic that potentially int…

I agree. New codebases are clean because they don't have all the warts of accumulated edge cases.

If the new codebase is messy because the team is moving fast as parent describes, that means the dev team is doing sloppy work in order to move fast. That type of speed is very short lived, because it's a lot harder to add 100 bugfixes to an already-messy codebase.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#159

Post by imiric »

cloverich wrote: post #85
perrygeo wrote: post #6

> Companies with relatively young, high-quality codebases benefit the most from generative AI tools, while companies with gnarly, legacy codebases will struggle to adopt them. In other words, the penalty for having a ‘high-debt’ codebase is now larger than ever. This mirrors my experience using LLMs on personal projects. They can provide good advice only to the extent that your project stays within the bounds of well…

For me same experience but opposite conclusion. LLM saves me time by being excellent at yak shaving, letting me focus on the things that truly need my attention. It would be great if they were good at the hard stuff too, but if I had to pick, the basics is where i want them the most. My brain just really dislikes that stuff, and i find it challenging to stay focused and motivated on those things.

> LLM saves me time by being excellent at yak shaving, letting me focus on the things that truly need my attention.

But these tools often don't generate working, let alone bug-free, code. Even for simple things, you still need to review and fix it, or waste time re-prompting them. All this takes time and effort, so I wonder how much time you're actually saving in the long run.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#160

Post by archy_ »

perrygeo wrote: post #6

> Companies with relatively young, high-quality codebases benefit the most from generative AI tools, while companies with gnarly, legacy codebases will struggle to adopt them. In other words, the penalty for having a ‘high-debt’ codebase is now larger than ever. This mirrors my experience using LLMs on personal projects. They can provide good advice only to the extent that your project stays within the bounds of well…

Ive noticed the same and wonder if this is the natural result of public codebases on average being simpler since small projects will always outnumber bigger ones (at least if you ignore forks with zero new commits)

If high quality closed off codebases were used in training, would we see an improvement in LLM quality for more complex use cases?

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