Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of Niven/Pournelle's "The Mote in God’s Eye" where the aliens have a very pragmatic/Jury-rigged approach to technology and everything is more or less improvised. I have noticed this with co-workers also, when you have the ability to read/write/understand things very quickly, you tend to spend much less time on making things tidy, clear and maintainable.
But then you end up in a state, 2 years down the line, where every single person that works in that code base haaaates it and adding any new functionality takes weeks or months. Compare that to clean, organized code where patterns and extensibility are established. I’ve seen product manager surprised at how fast a new feature was added when everything is laid out well.
Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
171–180 of 231 posts
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well it could miss relevant things to include in the spec.
Then you version and update the spec and when you commit you reference the diff in the -m
The only thing that will work is to have non-llm generated tests. But writing those require thinking, which is what we are trying to avoid. Also capturing every little behavior in tests is exhausting. If you don't like programming, you would also hate writing tests. So chances are that a major part of the program behavior does not show up in tests.
So throw it away and rewrite from scratch is a just wishful thinking that the LLM marketing wants you to commit to...
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google already has AI overviews which I use instead of polluting my ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini chats.
The unwanted effect of AI overviews, in my experience, is turning their users into very-confidently-wrong arguers of everything. The upside is that telling said users to double-check the sources usually results in them realizing the AI overview was wrong, but it's still a waste of everyone's time. The 2021-era of of just "Not finding the results" was maybe a better outcome.
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you version and update the spec and when you commit you reference the diff in the -m
That is quite unreliable. I would bet that your spec will be out of sync with the program behavior in no time. The only thing that will work is to have non-llm generated tests. But writing those require thinking, which is what we are trying to avoid. Also capturing every little behavior in tests is exhausting. If you don't like programming, you would also hate writing tests. So chances are that a major part of the pr…
However provided you stick to the discipline, it’s robust e2e TDD’d versioned worked through CI and in production
You get out of all these tools what you put in
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#175Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is quite unreliable. I would bet that your spec will be out of sync with the program behavior in no time. The only thing that will work is to have non-llm generated tests. But writing those require thinking, which is what we are trying to avoid. Also capturing every little behavior in tests is exhausting. If you don't like programming, you would also hate writing tests. So chances are that a major part of the pr…
I’ve successfully done exactly what is described. You have to actually implement discipline yes. That’s the key hard part. However provided you stick to the discipline, it’s robust e2e TDD’d versioned worked through CI and in production You get out of all these tools what you put in
Just consider this for a minute. If re-writes were so trivial, we would be re-writing software all of the time, even before LLMs. It is the fear of losing all the legacy additions that stop us from doing it.
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#177Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state s…
> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity. Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc.
People tend to not realize how far these models have become. I remember when they would always hallucinate APIs that wasn't there or make up fields that didn't exist.. those problems are virtually solved now. So with that in mind, why wouldn't AI be able to write better code? The code would have to be maintainable by AI itself (operating based on the assumption that the future will be Agentic Engineering)
I love how people have said this for over a year now, and no matter how often I try it, it's still just as broken.
Try it with any task that isn't in the training data. Say, a custom protocol where you need to cross-reference multiple implementations and the specs to really get it, and with no answers on stackoverflow or medium.
At first it's hilarious, but after a while it just gets exhausting. For all these real-world tasks you need to put so much effort in that it's much easier to just write the code yourself, even with the latest (current Gemini) and greatest (Opus 4.6/4.7) models.
If the parts for your project don't already exist, AI can't help you either. And if they do exist, why spend money on AI if the GitHub search is free and you can just fork and modify what you need?