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We should be more tired than the model

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Re: We should be more tired than the model

#151

Post by lanstin »

mhitza wrote: post #112
simonw wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably you're talking about statically typed languages? I mainly work in Python and JavaScript. I don't trust any refactors until I've seen the test suite pass. (OK, sure, "rename method" might be OK, but most of my refactors and design changes are more interesting than that.)

Shift-F6 (rename refactor) is my goto, and what I miss most in a code editor (maybe LSPs support that today for most languages). It also takes away the mental tax burden of thinking up good names for things when writing out code quickly on the first pass. Works very well with PHP (in PHPStorm), and I'd expect somewhat similar reliability in PyCharm on a Python project with some type annotations (or maybe even with no…

The point of good names is not just readability but also to sharpen your cognitive model of the solution. That moment when you realize you don’t know what to name a thing is a valuable prompt to deepen your thinking a bit.

And I sometimes prefer searching for the method names and changing them one by one (find-grip-dired followed by query replace) just to see where all the code is being used, if anything looks bad, if there is some opportunity for code reduction, etc. not that I don’t also prompt Claude to rename things, or better yet make sure all the SQL commands log enough etc.

Re: We should be more tired than the model

#152

Post by lanstin »

bonesss wrote: post #126
ryandrake wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, when I read about people using AI with prompts like that, my first thought is, "Wow, that's like copy/paste, but instead of Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, it's round-tripping to a server and using GPUs to do it." What's next? "Claude, rename the function doFoo() to performBar()"?

> What's next? "Claude, rename the function doFoo() to performBar()"? As an engineer: of course not, keyboards are more efficient. Also as an engineer: of course, “ tea, Earl Grey, hot ”, or what are we even working for?

My son bought a Japanese water heater to keep a liter of water at just below boiling at all times. For my 4 pm Ceylon tea break, milk no sugar, I refuse to use the prefab water; preferring to stick with my routine of boiling the water, to a rolling boil, adding it to the tea bag in the cup, and letting it steep. One doesn’t take tea to maximize efficiency but to pause and plan, or just let go the reins on attention and see what happens.

My son loves the always ready hot water.

Re: We should be more tired than the model

#153

Post by lanstin »

docheinestages wrote: post #34
simonw wrote: post #14

Something I've been trying recently for non-throwaway code is extensive refactoring, without typing any code myself but by closely directing the coding agent. Prompts like "move the code relating to SQL query analysis into a new file", "look for opportunities to use pytest parametrize to remove duplication in that test", "rename method X to Y". Early indications are that this is helping a lot with the problem where i…

I think the best approach is active code review as the agent does small batches. Or letting it come up with a solution, testing if it passes or fails the desired outcome, then creating a separate fresh project and asking it to rewrite in small parts, and have it explain to you what and why it's doing to achieve each part.

Yeah my main current work repo I have five clones of it (de1.main, de2.main etc) each with an agent in a tmux session. The main priority change I will have up in my emacs gui with editing the files and reading and so on, but the side ideas that used to just get a line in the ideas or todo section of daily.org now sometimes get a claude working on it. As POC at the least.

Re: We should be more tired than the model

#154

Post by lanstin »

bluGill wrote: post #46
paulmooreparks wrote: post #39

I don't know. I find that I'm moving up a level and improving my product-management skills while delegating most of the code to the agents. I'm still very much hands-on with the design and requirements, and I'm asking questions like, "What's our security story for XYZ?", "Are we accounting for colour-blindness?", etc. Not being down in the code allows me to prairie-dog a bit more and see the landscape better.

I'm about 50% that way. However when the AI is done coding I then step back and review to find places the code quality is unacceptable. I also have to stop the AI once in a while because it forgets the point and does something stupid. Junior engineer learn, AI does not.

I find that is the case for production code that will be running 24x7 unattended, but also Claude lets me build a lot more highly specific dashboards or visualization tools that I really don’t give a fig what the code is, as long as the numbers sum up and the links work. So my batch job I am careful with, the dashboard I check every morning to see what batches and lambdas failed eh I can wait the two minutes it takes to populate all the data; better to have time to top off coffee than having to understand modern JavaScript, canvas, D3 etc and web frameworks. I do force it to use python and flask for the web serving and SQLite for caching/ memoization, but everything else carte blanche.

Re: We should be more tired than the model

#156

Post by k_plankenhorn »

For people who couldn’t code at all before, AI coding tools don’t replace skill, they create access. My ability to build and retain the skills isn’t less because I didn’t have them to begin with pre-AI for coding. I can certainly say I’ve developed judgment. Knowing when the input is right, when to push back, when to rewrite. Maybe that’s the skill agentic coding builds for non-engineers?

Re: We should be more tired than the model

#157

Post by gjadi »

Interesting as I reach a similar pov. I just started with experimenting with the following workflow with Claude Code: - get a plan for whatever I want to do, iterating in plan mode until I am satisfied with the solution - before execution, I mark each phase that I want to do/learn about with /tutor-mode

Tutor-mode is a SKILL I made to have the LLM guide and teach through questions and hints.

So I delegate completely the boilerplate/build system/CI and switch to manual+aided by AI for specific implementation part of the code.

I also keep a final validation step to me because I've experimented a few too many "sorry I told you I passed the test suite and I did, but the build failed and I didn't told you".

Re: We should be more tired than the model

#158

Post by gjadi »

peteforde wrote: post #129

This post reminds me of a conversation I had with my dad in the late 90s when I was mostly using VB6 and he was encouraging me to learn C++. Even back then, the syntax and ceremony of the language repulsed me, and my admittedly arrogant reply was that if I ever needed C++, I'd just hire someone to do that part for me. For what it's worth, I still stand by that strategy 30 years later. Delegation is one of the most po…

You can't talk about delegation without talking about what and who you're delegating. Delegating a demo or an exploration to a junior is fine if you can help them with feedbacks and make them grow and the business is not on the line. Delegating a critical development to a senior engineer you've vetted on previous delivery is fine too. Delegating a critical development to a junior is a recipe for disaster.

Now, I'm still trying to figure out what I can fully delegate to an agent and what I can't. Right now, LLM feel like a senior on technical stuff and a junior on decision/taste. One thing is sure, I can't delegate a critical development to it, not without review. For that review, I need programming skills. Maybe in the future that won't be the case, but I am not seeing that right now. (Using Claude code)

Re: We should be more tired than the model

#159

Post by jraph »

vitally3643 wrote: post #150
ryandrake wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, when I read about people using AI with prompts like that, my first thought is, "Wow, that's like copy/paste, but instead of Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, it's round-tripping to a server and using GPUs to do it." What's next? "Claude, rename the function doFoo() to performBar()"?

"Pft, you use an entire IDE inside an electron web browser eating 16GB of memory to rename a function instead of a simple regex? What a waste"

Firstly, yes, software bloat is a waste.

Secondly, no, it's not even comparable with AI basically delaying electricity decarbonization on entire continent-sized countries, requiring entire coal-fired power stations and stealing all the ram and storage of the planet to build specific and short-lived hardware that will last few years and will be thrown away very fast.

Re: We should be more tired than the model

#160

Post by jraph »

duggan wrote: post #87
swatcoder wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

??? Mature workflows for those kinds of tasks have been mostly ubiquitous across professional-grade engineering tools like those from JetBrains or Visual Studio itself for longee than many people here have even been working in the trade. It's clearly not the case for simonw, but much of what many people task AI tools to do foe them are only a novelty for the "VS Code"-type users who stubbornly refused to explore more…

I used JetBrains IDEs for years. The refactoring tooling was fancy find-replace as far as I recall? Pretty cool in 2015, though.

It goes deeper than this, you have features like rename function / change method signature that will update your whole code base and even suggest applying such changes to related(-looking) functions.
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