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Write code like a human will maintain it

unstack.io

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Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#201

Post by swatcoder »

jwpapi wrote: post #170

Crazy how many engineers in here just say they are using another prompt on top. From my experience that makes things worse. It does abstractions, but the wrong ones. It overcomments, confusing future calls of the LLM. To me building on multiple scalable systems this has been the most dangerous part of LLMs. On a good codebase it will work good, but it will maek it worse, so you keep using it, till it doesnt work and…

> I write the code myself. I find it hard to believe why so many engineers try to avoid it.

Gradually over its recent booming years, software work went from one of several practical engineering refuges for curious tinkers and puzzle-addicts to a career path for financially ambitious bright people akin to finance, law, or medicine.

Many people carrying a "software engineer" title now never really enjoyed that part of the work at all but were suitably clever and responsible to accomplish what modest ends they were tasked to by their very generous employers. Mostly (but not entirely), those people are the ones most eager to have AI agents shield them from rigorous design and puzzle work and enable them to leverage their innate cleverness more lazily. They never really internalized the coding and engineering principles of the industry and so can't foresee what might be down the road for them with this technique, especially when they're surrounded by peers with the same mindset.

> AI isn’t always faster.

It is when coding was an extremely frustrating and high friction experience for you in the first place, as is the case for many who work among us now.

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#202

Post by stingraycharles »

davnicwil wrote: post #186

> The next time you ask the LLM for another endpoint with the same access rules, the model won't start from first principles. It'll start from the other four copies already sitting in your repo. To be honest I'm not sure how true this is. I think it's more that there does seem to be quite a baked-in bias to repeat basic structures and not reuse (much less come up with) abstractions. So where that is the existing patt…

“ There have been many cases where I've started a piece of work by laying down very rigid abstractions and a few examples of using them, and I explicitly prompt to not only exclusively use the specific abstraction API but also copy the way I've used it. And the (frontier) LLM does neither, it just steams ahead re-implementing things from scratch from bottom up basic structures”

Yup, this is the sad state of affairs that we’re currently in, and the only way to avoid this is to specifically instruct the model on how exactly to implement things.

From my point of view, I think this is fine, to be able to use these LLMs as fast implementation engines. The challenge is to make it surface these types of implementation decisions before it goes off doing it the wrong way.

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#204

Post by Invictus0 »

latexr wrote: post #54
Invictus0 wrote: post #4

[flagged]

It’s bizarre to me that so many people feel the need to keep parroting this corporate talking point. What do you care? If you think people who eschew LLMs for coding “are not going to make it” or “are going to get left behind”¹, then let them. More opportunities for you, right? Go do your own thing. ¹ As if “moving forward” or “progress” were always a positive. It’s not. Just look at how many regulations we have to f…

they're calling this the most european comment ever

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#205

Post by saghm »

jraph wrote: post #58
saghm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the proportion of code that drives homicidal behavior is heavily weighted towards non-comments. You're a lot more likely to piss off whoever inherits your code with the code that actually does something being bad or a lack of documentation than with comments.

I'm quite fine with no comments but correctly named variables and functions. This can't become out of sync contrarily to "out of band" comments. I take this over commented code with poorly named stuff any day. I've also seen a lot of comments that restate what the code already says and that's just noise, more work to keep in sync, an additional thing that can fail, and more cognitive load because you have to read twi…

Yep, I think I agree with pretty much all of this. There are a lot of cases where clearer naming can avoid needing comments, but there are also some cases where the code itself won't be clear enough. My personal stance is that in a world where nobody is immune from accidentally making a mistake in logic and writing a bug, comments that clarify the intent of code that might otherwise look strange are valuable for future readers of the code (whether human or LLM); at worst, they can potentially help someone avoid wasting time going down a rabbit hole because Chesterton's fence didn't have a signpost on it, and at best they actually expose gaps in what's handled when someone is able to notice a discrepancy between what's documented and what's actually happening.

Clear code takes precedence over commented code if either of them could be used to solve the problem of communicating what's going on; comments are still useful in the cases where clear code isn't always enough. Of course, being able to discern whether there's a way to make the code cleaner to avoid needing a comment is an art rather than a science, and it's a skill that I think few people excel at (and judging by how so much LLM-generated code is littered with inane comments, one that's also pretty rare in agents)

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#206

Post by leptons »

jwpapi wrote: post #170

Crazy how many engineers in here just say they are using another prompt on top. From my experience that makes things worse. It does abstractions, but the wrong ones. It overcomments, confusing future calls of the LLM. To me building on multiple scalable systems this has been the most dangerous part of LLMs. On a good codebase it will work good, but it will maek it worse, so you keep using it, till it doesnt work and…

>Sometimes I race AI i give it a prompt /bug to fix and at the sametime im greping/symboling through the codebase and tryto fix it myself. AI isn’t always faster.

+1 - this is also my experience. I also "race" the AI on some tasks, especially when it's simple and the AI is taking forever to return a result - so it even has a head start, and I often complete it faster or around the same time.

For some things maybe it is faster, but it isn't really returning a better result. It often turns into spaghetti, doing things I didn't ask it to do.

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#207

Post by leptons »

M0r13n wrote: post #198
radlad wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use LLMs for exploration and for review, but I write the code myself. I find it hard to believe why so many engineers try to avoid it. It’s not consuming much of my time. And it’s actually the most enjoyable part. At my workplace, there is more work to be done than there is engineers, and approximately 2 engineers per service. I can spin off multiple Claude Code instances on unrelated work, steering them occasion…

This seems to assume more code shipped equals more work done. I am still not convinced that this is necessarily the case. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. You mentioned that reviews are now the bottleneck and that your familiarity with the code has decreased. That tradeoff might eat into the parallelization gains over time.

Most people hyping their AI use mention the short-term gains without taking into account how it affects overall long-term success. We are creatures of convenience.

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#208

Post by radlad »

M0r13n wrote: post #198
radlad wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use LLMs for exploration and for review, but I write the code myself. I find it hard to believe why so many engineers try to avoid it. It’s not consuming much of my time. And it’s actually the most enjoyable part. At my workplace, there is more work to be done than there is engineers, and approximately 2 engineers per service. I can spin off multiple Claude Code instances on unrelated work, steering them occasion…

This seems to assume more code shipped equals more work done. I am still not convinced that this is necessarily the case. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. You mentioned that reviews are now the bottleneck and that your familiarity with the code has decreased. That tradeoff might eat into the parallelization gains over time.

Definitely not - the biggest risk with this increased speed is going full-bore in the wrong direction. A product mindset (and a critical eye to architecture) matters more now than ever.

Re: Write code like a human will maintain it

#209

Post by radlad »

leptons wrote: post #207
M0r13n wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to assume more code shipped equals more work done. I am still not convinced that this is necessarily the case. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. You mentioned that reviews are now the bottleneck and that your familiarity with the code has decreased. That tradeoff might eat into the parallelization gains over time.

Most people hyping their AI use mention the short-term gains without taking into account how it affects overall long-term success. We are creatures of convenience.

Considering most teams have only switched to heavy AI use in the past few months, the verdict is still out on this.

That said, I've had lots of success using AI to learn, refactor and clean up codebases.

I notice another trend were a lot of AI naysayers haven't really spent a ton of time getting intimately familiar with AI.

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