Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The highest quality codebase

gricha.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 409 posts

Re: The highest quality codebase

#161

Post by thewebguyd »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #82
onethought wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love that you are disagreeing with parent by saying you built software all on your own, and you only had 20 years software experience. Isn't that the point they are making?

Maybe I didn't make it clear, but I didn't build the software in my comment. A clanker did. Vibe-coding is a claude code QA loop on the end result that anyone can do (the non-experts in his claim). An example of a cycle looks like "now add an Options tab that let's me customize the global hotkey" where I'm only an end-user. Once again, where do my 20 years of software experience come up in a process where I don't eve…

> An example of a cycle looks like "now add an Options tab that let's me customize the global hotkey" where I'm only an end-user

Which is a prompt that someone with experience would write. Your average, non-technical person isn't going to prompt something like that, they are going to say "make it so I can change the settings" or something else super vague and struggle. We all know how difficult it is to define software requirements.

Just because an LLM wrote the actual code doesn't mean your prompts weren't more effective because of your experience and expertise in building software.

Sit someone down in front of an LLM with zero development or UI experience at all and they will get very different results. Chances are they won't even specify "macOS menu bar app" in the prompt and the LLM will end up trying to make them a webapp.

Your vibe coding experience just proves my initial point, that these tools are useful for those who already have experience and can lean on that to craft effective prompts. Someone non-technical isn't going to make effective use of an LLM to make software.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#162

Post by cultofmetatron »

xnorswap wrote: post #18

Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems. "Hey claude, I get this error message: ", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could. "Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest. It suggested enthusiastically a library for and it was all " Recommended " about it, but when I pointed out that the…

> There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving.

thats called job security!

Re: The highest quality codebase

#163

Post by embedding-shape »

n4r9 wrote: post #54
pdntspa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the…

I think we have different opinions on what's fun and what's boring!

Some people are into designing software, others like to put the design into implementation, others like cleaning up implementations yet others like making functional software faster.

There is enough work for all of us to be handsomely paid while having fun doing it :) Just find what you like, and work with others who like other stuff, and you'll get through even the worst of problems.

For me the fun comes not from the action of typing stuff with my sausage fingers and seeing characters end up on the screen, but basically everything before that and after that. So if I can make "translate what's in my head into source on disk something can run" faster, that's a win in my book, but not if the quality degrades too much, so tight control over it still not having to use my fingers to actually type.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#164

Post by maerF0x0 »

I would love to see someone do a longitudinal study of the incident/error rate of a canary container in prod that is managed by claude. Basically doing a control/experimental group to prove who does better the Humans or the AI?

Re: The highest quality codebase

#165

Post by thewebguyd »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #70
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm weird but I enjoy "actually writing the code."

“I want my AI to do laundry and dishes so I can code, not for my AI to code so I can do laundry and dishes”

This sums up my feelings almost exactly.

I don't want LLMs, AI, and eventually Robots to take over the fun stuff. I want them to do the mundane, physical tasks like laundry and dishes, leave me to the fun creative stuff.

But as we progress right now, the hype machine is pushing AI to take over art, photography, video, coding, etc. All the stuff I would rather be doing. Where's my house cleaning robot?

Re: The highest quality codebase

#166

Post by pdntspa »

mjr00 wrote: post #78
pdntspa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the…

> That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am so tired of this analogy. Have the people who say this never worked with a junior dev before? If you treat your junior devs as brainless code monkeys who only exist to type out yo…

I have mentored and worked with a junior dev. And the only way to get her to do anything useful and productive was to spell things out. Otherwise she got wrapped around the axle trying to figure out the complex things and was constantly asking for my help with basic design-level tasks. Doing the grunt work is how you learn the higher-level stuff.

When I was a junior, that's how it was for me. The senior gave me something that was structured and architected and asked me to handle smaller tasks that were beneath them.

Giving juniors full autonomy is a great way to end up with an unmaintainable mess that is a nightmare to work with without substancial refactoring. I know this because I have made a career out of fixing exactly this mistake.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#167

Post by pdntspa »

tayo42 wrote: post #151
saulpw wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typescript on the frontend, Python on the backend, SQL for the database, bash for CI. This isn't even counting HTML/CSS or the YAML config.

I wouldn't call html, yaml or css languages. Same for sql, do you really context switch between sql and other code that frequently? Everyone should stop using bash, especially if you have a scripting language you can use already.

Dude have you even written any hardcore SQL? plpgSQL is very much a turing-complete language

Re: The highest quality codebase

#168

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

postalcoder wrote: post #21

One of my favorite personal evals for llms is testing its stability as a reviewer. The basic gist of it is to give the llm some code to review and have it assign a grade multiple times. How much variance is there in the grade? Then, prompt the same llm to be a "critical" reviewer with the same code multiple times. How much does that average critical grade change? A low variance of grades across many generations and a…

How is this different than testing the temperature?

Re: The highest quality codebase

#169

Post by mjr00 »

pdntspa wrote: post #166
mjr00 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am so tired of this analogy. Have the people who say this never worked with a junior dev before? If you treat your junior devs as brainless code monkeys who only exist to type out yo…

I have mentored and worked with a junior dev. And the only way to get her to do anything useful and productive was to spell things out. Otherwise she got wrapped around the axle trying to figure out the complex things and was constantly asking for my help with basic design-level tasks. Doing the grunt work is how you learn the higher-level stuff. When I was a junior, that's how it was for me. The senior gave me somet…

I have never worked with junior devs as incompetent as you describe, having worked at AWS, Splunk/Cisco, among others. At AWS even interns essentially got assigned a full project for their term and were just told to go build it. Does your company just have an absurdly low hiring bar for juniors?

> Giving juniors full autonomy is a great way to end up with an unmaintainable mess that is a nightmare to work with without substancial refactoring.

Nobody is suggesting they get full autonomy to cowboy code and push unreviewed changes to prod. Everything they build should be getting reviewed by their peers and seniors. But they need opportunities to explore and make mistakes and get feedback.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#170

Post by jesse__ »

> This app is around 4-5 screens. The version "pre improving quality" was already pretty large. We are talking around 20k lines of TS

Fucking yikes dude. When's the last time it took you 4500 lines per screen, 9000 including the JSON data in the repo????? This is already absolute insanity.

I bet I could do this entire app in easily less than half, probably less than a tenth, of that.

Post reply on HN