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The highest quality codebase

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Re: The highest quality codebase

#221

Post by skydhash »

mjr00 wrote: post #158
skydhash wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes I just want to see which one feels like the most natural fit. This sentence alone is a huge red flag in my books. Either you know the problem domain and can argue about which solution is better and why. Or you don't and what you're doing are experiment to learn the domain. There's a reason the field is called Software Engineering and not Software Art. Words like "feels" does not belongs. It would be like…

> There's a reason the field is called Software Engineering and not Software Art. Words like "feels" does not belongs. Software development is nowhere near advanced enough for this to be true. Even basic questions like "should this project be built in Go, Python, or Rust?" or "should this project be modeled using OOP and domain-driven design, event-sourcing, or purely functional programming?" are decided largely by t…

Such questions may be decided by personal preferences, but their impact can easily be demonstrated. Such impacts are what F. Brooks calls accidental complexity and we generally called technical debt. It's just that, unlike other engineering fields, there are not a lot of physical constraints and the decision space have much more dimensions.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#222

Post by skydhash »

fluidcruft wrote: post #180
skydhash wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes I just want to see which one feels like the most natural fit. This sentence alone is a huge red flag in my books. Either you know the problem domain and can argue about which solution is better and why. Or you don't and what you're doing are experiment to learn the domain. There's a reason the field is called Software Engineering and not Software Art. Words like "feels" does not belongs. It would be like…

For example sometimes you're faced with choosing between high-quality libraries to adopt and it's not particularly clear whether you picked the wrong one until after you've tried integrating them. I've found it can be pretty helpful to let the LLM try them all and see where the issues ultimately are.

> sometimes you're faced with choosing between high-quality libraries to adopt and it's not particularly clear whether you picked the wrong one until after you've tried integrating them.

Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never encountered this situation. It has been mostly about what tradeoffs I'm willing to make. Libraries are more line of codes added to the project, thus they are liabilities. Including one is always a bad decision, so I only do so because the alternative is worse. Having to choose between two is more like between Scylla and Charybdis (known tradeoffs) than deciding to go left or right in a maze (mystery outcome).

Re: The highest quality codebase

#223

Post by agumonkey »

Nemi wrote: post #173
n4r9 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You've really hit the crux of the problem and why so many people have differing opinions about AI coding. I also find coding more fun with AI. The reason is that my main goal is to solve a problem, or someone else's problem, in a way that is satisfying. I don't much care about the code itself anymore. I care about the thing that it does when it's done. Having said that I used to be deep into coding and back then I am…

it's true that 'code' doesn't mean much, but the ability to manage different layers, states to produce logic modules was the challenge

getting things solved entirely feels very very numbing to me

even when gemini or chatgpt solves it well, and even beyond what i'd imagine.. i feel a sense of loss

Re: The highest quality codebase

#224

Post by agumonkey »

pdntspa wrote: post #181
Nemi wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've really hit the crux of the problem and why so many people have differing opinions about AI coding. I also find coding more fun with AI. The reason is that my main goal is to solve a problem, or someone else's problem, in a way that is satisfying. I don't much care about the code itself anymore. I care about the thing that it does when it's done. Having said that I used to be deep into coding and back then I am…

You are hitting the nail on the head. We are not being hired to write code. We are being hired to solve problems. Code is simply the medium.

but do you solve the problem if you just slap a prompt and iterate while the LLM gathers diffs ?

Re: The highest quality codebase

#225

Post by plufz »

airstrike wrote: post #34
plufz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think slash commands are great to help Claude with this. I have many like /code:dry /code:clean-code etc that has a semi long prompt and references to longer docs to review code from a specific perspective. I think it atleast improves Claude a bit in this area. Like processes or templates for thinking in broader ways. But yes I agree it struggles a lot in this area.

Somewhat tangential but interestingly I'd hate for Claude to make any changes with the intent of sticking to "DRY" or "Clean Code". Neither of those are things I follow, and either way design is better informed by the specific problems that need to be solved rather than by such general, prescriptive principles.

I agree, so obviously I direct it with more info and point it to code that I believe needs more of specific principles. But generally I would like Claude to produce more DRY code, it is great at reimplementing the same thing in five places instead of making a shared utility module.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#226

Post by platevoltage »

rootnod3 wrote: post #97
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…

Cool cool cool. So if you use LLMs as junior devs, let me ask you how future awesome senior devs like you will come around? From WHAT job experience? From what coding struggle?

There's that long term thinking that the tech industry, and really every other publicly traded company is known for.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#227

Post by mjr00 »

skydhash wrote: post #221
mjr00 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason the field is called Software Engineering and not Software Art. Words like "feels" does not belongs. Software development is nowhere near advanced enough for this to be true. Even basic questions like "should this project be built in Go, Python, or Rust?" or "should this project be modeled using OOP and domain-driven design, event-sourcing, or purely functional programming?" are decided largely by t…

Such questions may be decided by personal preferences, but their impact can easily be demonstrated. Such impacts are what F. Brooks calls accidental complexity and we generally called technical debt. It's just that, unlike other engineering fields, there are not a lot of physical constraints and the decision space have much more dimensions.

> Such questions may be decided by personal preferences, but their impact can easily be demonstrated.

I really don't think this is true. What was the demonstrated impact of writing Terraform in Go rather than Rust? Would writing Terraform in Rust have resulted in a better product? Would rewriting it now result in a better product? Even among engineers with 15 years experience you're going to get differing answers on this.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#228

Post by breuleux »

Nemi wrote: post #173
n4r9 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You've really hit the crux of the problem and why so many people have differing opinions about AI coding. I also find coding more fun with AI. The reason is that my main goal is to solve a problem, or someone else's problem, in a way that is satisfying. I don't much care about the code itself anymore. I care about the thing that it does when it's done. Having said that I used to be deep into coding and back then I am…

I think it ultimately comes down to whether you care more about the what, or more about the how. A lot of coders love the craft: making code that is elegant, terse, extensible, maintainable, efficient and/or provably correct, and so on. These are the kind of people who write programming languages, database engines, web frameworks, operating systems, or small but nifty utilities. They don't want to simply solve a problem, they want to solve a problem in the "best" possible way (sometimes at the expense of the problem itself).

It's typically been productive to care about the how, because it leads to better maintainability and a better ability to adapt or pivot to new problems. I suppose that's getting less true by the minute, though.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#229

Post by wosat »

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.

Sorry for being pedantic, but what does the "L" stand for in HTML, YAML, SQL? They may not be "programming languages" or, in the case of SQL, a "general purpose programming language", but they are indeed languages.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#230

Post by ericmcer »

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…

Exactly, if you visualize software as a bunch separate "states" (UI state, app state, DB state) then our job is to mutate states and synchronize those mutations across the system. LLMs are good at mutating a specific state in a specific way. They are trash at designing what data shape a state should be, and they are bad at figuring out how/why to propagate mutations across a system.
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