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Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

karimjedda.com

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Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#181

Post by bigstrat2003 »

consumer451 wrote: post #122
drTobiasFunke wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Not in speed, but in quality” — unfortunately though, not a single CEO, executive, company, VC, investor or anyone with the power to make decisions cares about quality instead of speed.

I agree. Also, what does "code quality" even mean in the age of agentic dev? If the code works, and is secure, what else matters? I do know what good code looks like, but does that even matter anymore? All I know is that now, I get to focus on endless UX polish, which is the only thing the matters. I feel like we are living through something like the Protestant Reformation, where priests once spoke Latin, and then st…

> If the code works, and is secure, what else matters?

Maybe so, but it doesn't.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#182

Post by baron3dl »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #79
baron3dl wrote: post #22

What is the right, best software organization in the current era of AI coding? This question is critical and wholly unanswered in comprehensive research along the same axis as Accelerate (2018, Forsgren, Humble, Kim). There are a lot of (excruciatingly) long-form posts about what folks are pioneering but not a whole lot of follow up about what failed. Where are the short posts on the negative space? How did halving y…

> and don't make me read 2653 words when 300 do it better. A million times this. Can we please RL the next models to learn the “if I had more time I would’ve written a shorter letter” method please. I see it every day in tickets, many communication channels, PR descriptions, comments, documentation. All have at least 70% verbose fluff which is so taxing and makes it very hard to keep track of the one important thing…

It's not just the length, but the ramp. You have 50 words to hook me onto the next 100, which hook me on to the next 150. If you're going to go beyond 300 words, it'd goddamned better be something that I am electing into, not something I'm required to get to whatever is your point. If it's obviously TLDR, I prompt Claude to summarize a paste of the post with the same framing: 50, +100, +150, and beyond only if absolutely necessary.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#183

Post by Silhouette »

consumer451 wrote: post #122
drTobiasFunke wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Not in speed, but in quality” — unfortunately though, not a single CEO, executive, company, VC, investor or anyone with the power to make decisions cares about quality instead of speed.

I agree. Also, what does "code quality" even mean in the age of agentic dev? If the code works, and is secure, what else matters? I do know what good code looks like, but does that even matter anymore? All I know is that now, I get to focus on endless UX polish, which is the only thing the matters. I feel like we are living through something like the Protestant Reformation, where priests once spoke Latin, and then st…

Also, what does "code quality" even mean in the age of agentic dev? If the code works, and is secure, what else matters?

AI pricing is mostly based on tokens consumed right now. Shouldn't that mean being able to quickly and reliably analyse existing code and to make only small local changes to implement new functionality is as valuable as ever - if not more so - if you're relying on agentic LLMs to do the grunt work?

A lot of things about writing clear specs and developing systematically and employing lots of different kinds of checks and controls to ensure quality and performance have always been true but used to get brushed under the carpet by a lot of cheap/lazy development teams. If LLMs really do accelerate everything about development - including negative behaviours like acting undesirably based on flawed or ambiguous information and doubling down on mistaken assumptions - then the pattern across all of these areas is that doing things the right way is more important than ever if you want to get good results from AI assistance.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#184

Post by gamblor956 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #178
theptip wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, all of the staff/principal engineers I work with are ~99%+ AI generated code, and increasing business value delivered as a result. This is on planet scale infra not CRUD apps. (And yes, you do need to carefully review the output and give steers/corrections. It’s still faster.) At this point if you can’t get the agent to write good code then either I) you are in a very specific niche (like Karpathy trying to w…

No, the tools really are bad, and everyone claiming they are good really is wrong. Or deliberately lying.

They're both wrong and deliberately lying.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#186

Post by dbingham »

theptip wrote: post #128
gste wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is outdated. If you follow spec-driven development, get the model to do all the planning work upfront, review and iterate the plan, write clear markdown file documentation on the abstractions and patterns you want to follow, then you have every opportunity to tell the model how you want it to write the code. If you use Opus or Fable 5 it will then write the code better and faster than you will.

Agreed, all of the staff/principal engineers I work with are ~99%+ AI generated code, and increasing business value delivered as a result. This is on planet scale infra not CRUD apps. (And yes, you do need to carefully review the output and give steers/corrections. It’s still faster.) At this point if you can’t get the agent to write good code then either I) you are in a very specific niche (like Karpathy trying to w…

> Agreed, all of the staff/principal engineers I work with are ~99%+ AI generated code, and increasing business value delivered as a result. This is on planet scale infra not CRUD apps.

This has been the pro-"write with LLMs" argument the whole time. "If you're not getting good results, you're not prompting well. FAANG are doing x% of their development with AI."

Yet all of the companies that I can think of that build on planet scale infra and have gone all in on LLM development have seen a marked drop in quality and stability since adopting LLM driven development.

So yeah, I don't buy it. When I hear that engineers are writing their with LLMs and I see quality improve or stabilize, then maybe I will start to question whether its a prompting issue.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#187

Post by mikewarot »

To clarify, this article is not about the practice of Engineering [1], nor the management thereof.

Words have meaning, and I strongly feel that clarity here is helpful.

An engineering approach to software development would include rigorous testing and require individual signoff for every library and module. It is quite clear that an LLM would not be able to meet this requirement.

When casting about for ideas or prototypes, the throw away nature could allow their limited use.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#188

Post by therealpygon »

tripleee wrote: post #153
gste wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is outdated. If you follow spec-driven development, get the model to do all the planning work upfront, review and iterate the plan, write clear markdown file documentation on the abstractions and patterns you want to follow, then you have every opportunity to tell the model how you want it to write the code. If you use Opus or Fable 5 it will then write the code better and faster than you will.

you're a lot more skilled than I am if you're able to know the abstractions and patterns you want while only have a weak grasp on the actual code. For me the abstractions emerge as I understand what I'm actually working with

> while only have a weak grasp on the actual code.

How much of a grasp does one need on the UEFI code operating their computer? The drivers that operate a hard drive? The communication protocols for their monitor?

This seems to me to be the fallacy — that all code must always be understood to operate properly or to be useful. If the AI is sufficiently intelligent enough to understand the code, at some point (most) people won’t need to. Not saying that’s now, but that is likely to be where things are headed in the long horizon. That said, I don’t have a crystal ball, nor do the people claiming that won’t be the outcome, so right now it seems more like people arguing about which forks should be used while the cake is still in the oven.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#189

Post by davidkoenit »

RyanHamilton wrote: post #76
SoftTalker wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle the fact that an LLM can't seem to help itself from disgorging page after page of words no matter what it's asked to do? I've never seen an LLM say "this looks good as-is; I would not spend any more time on it; what's next?" it will always seem to suggest using another pattern or additional abstractions or other yak shaving. But to be fair human code reviews have the same problem. It's like reviewer…

I've tried and tried to get an LLM to delete code, it couldn't do it. I knew a file was 40% bad so what I ended up doing was deleting the file, then asking AI to create the missing file. That's how I got AI to delete code :)

Have you tried asking it to rewrite a file with less lines of code? It can do this.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#190

Post by davidkoenit »

YZF wrote: post #127
SoftTalker wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle the fact that an LLM can't seem to help itself from disgorging page after page of words no matter what it's asked to do? I've never seen an LLM say "this looks good as-is; I would not spend any more time on it; what's next?" it will always seem to suggest using another pattern or additional abstractions or other yak shaving. But to be fair human code reviews have the same problem. It's like reviewer…

I've totally had latest models just say "here are minor nits but this is good to ship" when reviewing code. Claude is a bit more verbose usually but Codex by default is pretty terse. My experience anyways. They also take pushback on suggestions (this isn't actually a problem because X) and they'll agree and say ship it (hopefully only when you're right and it's not a problem ;) ).

So it seems like more of Claude/Opus problem?
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