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The highest quality codebase

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Re: The highest quality codebase

#201

Post by mkehrt »

embedding-shape wrote: post #163
n4r9 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I've found that good tab AI-based tab completion is the sweet spot for me. I am still writing code, but I don't have to type all of it if it's obvious.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#202

Post by barbazoo »

> I can sort of respect that the dependency list is pretty small, but at the cost of very unmaintainable 20k+ lines of utilities. I guess it really wanted to avoid supply-chain attacks.

> Some of them are really unnecessary and could be replaced with off the shelf solution

Lots of people would regard this as a good thing. Surely the LLM can't guess which kind you are.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#203

Post by pdntspa »

rootnod3 wrote: post #177
pdntspa wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last job there was effectively a gun held to the back of my head, ordering me to use this stuff. And this started about a year ago, when the tooling for agentic dev was absolutely atrocious, because we had a CTO who had the biggest most raging boner for anything that offered even a whiff of "AI". Unfortunately the bar is being raised on us. If you can't hang with the new order you are out of a job. I promise I was…

Ok, now assume you start relying on it and let's assume cloud flare has another outage. You just go and clock out for the day saying "can't work, agent is down"? I don't think we'll be out of jobs. Maybe temporarily. But those jobs come back. The energy and money drain that LLMs are, are just not sustainable. I mean, it's cool that you got the project knocked out in a month or two, but if you'd sit down now without a…

When the POS system goes down at a restaurant they'll revert to pen and paper. Can't imagine its much different in that case.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#204

Post by mrsmrtss »

tracker1 wrote: post #138

On the Result responses... I've seen this a few times. I think it works well in Rust or other languages that don't have the ability to "throw" baked in. However, when you bolt it on to a language that implicitly can throw, you're now doing twice the work as you have to handle the explicit error result and integrated errors. I worked in a C# codebase with Result responses all over the place, and it just really complic…

The Result pattern also works exceptionally well with C#, provided you ensure that code returning a Result object never throws an exception. Of course, there are still some exceptional things that can throw, but this is essentially the same situation as dealing with Rust panics.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#205

Post by d-lisp »

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…

I remember about a problem I had while quick testing notcurses. I tried chatGPT which produced a lot of weird but kinda believable statements about the fact that I had to include wchar and define a specific preprocessor macro, AND I had to place the includes for notcurses, other includes and macros in a specific order.

My sentiment was "that's obviously a weird non-intended hack" but I wanted to test quickly, and well ... it worked. Later, reading the man-pages I aknowledged the fact that I needed to declare specific flags for gcc in place of the gpt advised solution.

I think these kind of value based judgements are hard to emulate for LLMs, it's hard for them to identifiate a single source as the most authoritative source in a sea of lesser authoritative (but numerous) sources.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#206

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

Pannoniae wrote: post #184
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how to interpret someone saying they don't follow DRY. Do you meant taking it to the Zealous extreme, or do you abhor helper functions? Is this a "No True Scottsman" thing?

Not GP but I can strongly relate to it. Most of the programming I do is related to me making a game. I follow WET principles (write everything twice at least) because the abstraction penalty is huge, both in terms of performance and design, a bad abstraction causes all subsequent content to be made much slower. Which I can't afford as a small developer. Same with most other "clean code" principles. My codebase is ~70…

OK, I can follow WET before you DRY, to me that's just a non-zealous version of Don't Repeat Yourself.

I think, if you're writing code where you know the entire code base, a lot of the clean principles seem less important, but once you get someone who doesn't, and that can be you coming back to the project in three months, suddenly they have value.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#207

Post by moffkalast »

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”

Well it would be funnier if dishwashers, washing machines and dryers didn't automate that ages ago. It's literally one of the first things robots started doing for us.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#208

Post by order-matters »

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…

TBH I think its ability to structure unstructured data is what makes it a powerhouse tool and there is so much juice to squeeze there that we can make process improvements for years even if it doesnt get any better at general intelligence.

If I had a pdf printout of a table, the workflow i used to have to use to get that back into a table data structure to use for automation was hard (annoying). dedicated OCR tools with limitations on inputs, multiple models in that tool for the different ways the paper the table was on might be formatted. it took hours for a new input format

now i can take a photo of something with my phone and get a data table in like 30 seconds.

people seem so desperate to outsource their thinking to these models and operating at the limits of their capability, but i have been having a blast using it to cut through so much tedium that werent unsolved problems but required enough specialized tooling and custom config to be left alone unless you really had to

this fits into what youre saying with using it to do the grunt work i find boring i suppose, but feels a little bit more than that - like it has opened a lot of doors to spaces that had grunt work that wasnt worth doing for the end result previously but now it is

Re: The highest quality codebase

#209

Post by bopbopbop7 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #194
ModernMech wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother wouldn't be able to do what you did. She wouldn't even know where to start despite using LLMs all the time. Half of my CS students wouldn't know where to start either. None of my freshman would. My grad students can do this but not all of them. Your 20 years is assisting you in ways you don't know; you're so experienced you don't know what it means to be inexperienced anymore. Now, it's true you probably do…

The person at the top of the thread only made a claim about "non-experts". Your mom wouldn't vibe-code software that she wants not because she's not a software engineer, but because she doesn't engage with software as a user at the level where she cares to do that. Consider these two vibe-coded examples of waybar apps in r/omarchy where the OP admits he has zero software experience: - Weather app: https://www.reddit.…

Your best examples of non-experts are two Linux power users?

Re: The highest quality codebase

#210

Post by order-matters »

pdntspa wrote: post #43
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…

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 wonder if DRY is still a principle worth holding onto in the AI coding era. I mean it probably is, but this feels like enough of a shift in coding design that re-evaluating principles designed for human-only coding might be worth the effort
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