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AI can code, but it can't build software

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Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#161

Post by theshrike79 »

skydhash wrote: post #134
lan321 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what takes time though. When you need to make a wrapper for some API for example LLMs are incredible. You give it a template, the payload format and the possible methods and it just spits out a 500-1000 line class in 15 seconds. Do it for 20 classes, that's work for a week 'done' in 30 mins. Realistically 2 days since you still have to fix and test a lot but still..

Or write a lisp macro in one hour and be done. Or install an opengenerator and be done in 10 minutes, 9 of which is configuring the generator.

Can a Lisp macro automatically search for, and find, the API documentation and apply it to the output?

I've implemented connections to (public) APIs of different services multiple times using LLMs without even looking up the APIs myself.

I just say "Enrich the data about this game from Steam's API" and that's about it.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#162

Post by theshrike79 »

torginus wrote: post #128
latentsea wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think C# is really going to shine in the LLM coding era. You can write Roslyn Analyzers to fail the build on arbitrary conditions after inspecting the AST. LLMs are great at helping you write these too. If you get a solid architecture well defined you can then use these as guardrails to constrain development to only happen in the manner you intend. You can then get LLMs to implement features and guarantee the code…

I do quite a bit of coding in C#, and have a lot of experience, and personally I haven't found LLMs to be that great a help at writing C#. First, LLMs are great at learning new tech stacks, but good ol' ASP.NET has been pretty much stable since forever. Second, I think Rider/Resharper is the greatest piece of autocomplete tech ever made, seriously nothing ever comes, close, which means I'd rather do a refactor using…

> Lastly, AI seems to be focused around its own set of tooling, like Cursor

Nah, the best coding LLMs are console applications like Claude Code, Codex CLI and the like.

Editor integration mostly brings more tools, like tapping into different validators on VSCode and examining the "problems" view.

Also Rider's autocomplete is at least partially AI powered unless you specifically disable it IIRC.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#163

Post by theshrike79 »

somebehemoth wrote: post #149
simonw wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said "the majority of software development". Those are both relatively niche disciplines in 2025.

Can you please explain? Are you saying all software development outside of the web is "niche"?

Niche as in for every one systems programmer there are dozens of people writing API Glue.

By hours of work spent and lines of code produced the latter is in a whole different scale than systems programmers (which is a very badly designed term anyway).

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#164

Post by OptionOfT »

AI can produce code that looks like patterns which it has seen as part of its training data.

It can recognize patterns in the codebase it is looking at and extrapolate from that.

Which is why generated code is filled with comments most often seen in either tutorial level code or JavaScript (explaining the types of values).

Beyond that performance drops rapidly, and hallucinations go up inversely.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#165

Post by theshrike79 »

jumploops wrote: post #19

I've been forcing myself to "pure vibe-code" on a few projects, where I don't read a single line of code (even the diffs in codex/claude code). Candidly, it's awful. There are countless situations where it would be faster for me to edit the file directly (CSS, I'm looking at you!). With that said, I've been surprised at how far the coding agents are able to go[0], and a lot less surprised about where I need to step i…

Sonnet 4.5 is rebranded Opus 4. That's where it got its token-happiness.

Try asking Opus to generate a simple application and it'll do it. It'll also add thousands of lines of setup scripts and migration systems and Dockerfiles and reports about how it built everything and... Ooof.

Sonnet 4.5 is the same, but at a slightly smaller scale. It still LOVES to generate markdown reports of features it did. No clue why, but by default it's on, you need to specifically tell it to stop doing that.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#166

Post by theshrike79 »

svachalek wrote: post #37
jumploops wrote: post #19

I've been forcing myself to "pure vibe-code" on a few projects, where I don't read a single line of code (even the diffs in codex/claude code). Candidly, it's awful. There are countless situations where it would be faster for me to edit the file directly (CSS, I'm looking at you!). With that said, I've been surprised at how far the coding agents are able to go[0], and a lot less surprised about where I need to step i…

Also, put heavy lint rules in place, and commit hooks to make sure everything compiles, lints, passes tests, etc. You've got to be super, super defensive. But Claude Code will see all those barriers and respond to them automatically which saves you the trouble of being vigilant over so many little things. You just need to watch the big picture, like make sure tests are there to replicate bugs, new features are tested…

Same as when coding with humans, better tests and linters will give you a shorter and simpler iteration loop.

LLMs love that.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#167

Post by theshrike79 »

bloppe wrote: post #29
hamasho wrote: post #22

The problem with vibe coding is it demoralizes experienced software engineers. I'm developing a MVP with vibes and Claude Code and Codex output work in many cases for this relatively new project. But the quality of code is bad. There is already duplicated or unused logic, a lot of code is unnecessarily complex (especially React and JSX). And there's little PR reviews so that "we can keep velocity". I'm paying much le…

> I'm paying much less attention for quality now. After all, why bother when AI produce working code? I hear this so much. It's almost like people think code quality is unrelated to how well the product works. As though you can have 1 without the other. If your code quality is bad, your product will be bad. It may be good enough for a demo right now, but that doesn't mean it really "works".

There is space for a generic tool that defines code quality as code. Something like ast-grep[0] or Roslyn analysers. Linters for some languages like Go do a lot of lifting in this field, but there could be more checks.

With that you could specify exactly what "good code" looks like and prevent the LLM from even committing stuff that doesn't match the rules.

[0] https://ast-grep.github.io

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#168

Post by theshrike79 »

thegrim33 wrote: post #66

And here I am, using AI twice within the last 12 hours, to ask it two questions about an extremely well used, extremely well documented, physics library, and both times having it return to me sample code which makes use of library methods which don't exist. When I tell it this, I get the "Oh, you're so right to point that out!" response, and get new code returned, which still just blatantly doesn't work.

Someone had a blog post that said if a LLM hallucinates a method in your library, that means it should statistically have a method like that. LLMs work on probabilities and if the math says something should be there, who are you to argue =)

Also use MCPs like codex7 and Agentic LLMs for more interactivity instead of just relying on a raw model.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#169

Post by skydhash »

simonw wrote: post #151
somebehemoth wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please explain? Are you saying all software development outside of the web is "niche"?

Not necessarily niche, but less common. Take a look at the JetBrains developer survey if you want some numbers: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2024/

I have a much more close relation with other niches than with web programming, even if web programming is part of my core skill set. I mostly interact with a few sites daily, even though I spend some time there. But I spend a lot of time with software like xterm, emacs, calibre, cmus,... and more with tooling like make, bash. While I'm not working on those, I had to become quite familiar with their working to troubleshoot some bug. Emacs is more important to me than AWS and GitHub.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#170

Post by colordrops »

bloppe wrote: post #39
colordrops wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once all the context that a typical human engineer has to "build software" is available to the LLM, I'm not so sure that this statement will hold true.

But it's becoming increasingly clear that LLMs based on the transformer model will never be able to scale their context much further than the current frontier, due mainly to context rot. Taking advantage of greater context will require architectural breakthroughs.

Will it though? The human mind can hold less context at any one time than even a mediocre LLM. The problem isn't architecture. It's capturing context. Most of it is in a bunch of people's heads and encoded in the physical world. Once it's digitized and accessible through search, RAG, or whatever, the LLM will be able to use it effectively.
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