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The highest quality codebase

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Re: The highest quality codebase

#231

Post by skydhash »

mjr00 wrote: post #227
skydhash wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The impact is that now, if you want to modify the project in some way, you will need to learn Go. It's like all the codebases in COBOL. Maybe COBOL at that time was the best language for the product, but now, it's not that easy to find someone with the knowledge to maintain the system. As soon as you make a choice, you accept that further down the line, there will be some X cost to keep going in that direction and some Y cost to revert. As a technical lead, more often you need to ensure that X or/and Y don't grow to be enormous.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#232

Post by fluidcruft »

skydhash wrote: post #222
fluidcruft wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It probably depends on what you're working on. For the most part relying on a high-quality library/module that already implements a solution is less code to maintain. Any problems with the shared code can be fixed upstream with more eyeballs and more coverage than anything I build locally. I prefer to keep my eyeballs on things most related to my domain and not maintain stuff that's both ultimately not terribly important and replaceable (if push comes to shove).

Generally, you are correct that having multiple libraries to choose among is concerning, but it really depends. Mostly it's stylistic choices and it can be hard to tell how it integrates before trying.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#233

Post by dolftax »

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…

The structured vs open-ended distinction here applies to code review too. When you ask an LLM to "find issues in this code", it'll happily find something to say, even if the code is fine. And when there are actual security vulnerabilities, it often gets distracted by style nitpicks and misses the real issues.

Static analysis has the opposite problem - very structured, deterministic, but limited to predefined patterns and overwhelms you in false positives.

The sweet spot seems to be to give structure to what the LLM should look for, rather than letting it roam free on an open-ended "review this" prompt.

We built Autofix Bot[1] around this idea.

[1] https://autofix.bot (disclosure: founder)

Re: The highest quality codebase

#234

Post by thomassmith65 »

With a good programmer, if they do multiple passes of a refactor, each pass makes the code more elegant, and the next pass easier to understand and further improve.

Claude has a bias to add lines of code to a project, rather than make it more concise. Consequently, each refactoring pass becomes more difficult to untangle, and harder to improve.

Ideally, in this experiment, only the first few passes would result in changes - mostly shrinking the project size, and from then on, Claude would change nothing - just a like a very good programmer.

This is the biggest problem with developing with Claude, by far. Anthropic should laser focus on fixing it.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#235

Post by ModernMech »

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.…

I didn't make clear I was responding to your question:

"Where do my 20 years of software dev experience fit into this except beyond imparting my aesthetic preferences?"

Anyway, I think you kind of unintentionally proved my point. These two examples are pretty trivial as far as software goes, and it enabled someone with a little technical experience to implement them where before they couldn't have.

They work well because:

a) the full implementation for these apps don't even fill up the AI context window. It's easy to keep the LLM on task.

b) it's a tutorial style-app that people often write as "babby's first UI widget", so there are thousands of examples of exactly this kind of thing online; therefore the LLM has little trouble summoning the correct code in its entirety.

But still, someone with zero technical experience is going to be immediately thwarted by the prompts you provided.

Take the first one "I want a menubar app that shows me the current weather".

https://chatgpt.com/share/693b20ac-dcec-8001-8ca8-50c612b074...

ChatGPT response: "Nice — here's a ready-to-run macOS menubar app you can drop into Xcode..."

She's already out of her depth by word 11. You expect your mom to use Xcode? Mine certainly can't. Even I have trouble with Xcode and I use it for work. Almost every single word in that response would need to be explained to her, it might as well be a foreign language.

Now, the LLM could help explain it to her, and that's what's great about them. But by the time she knows enough to actually find the original response actionable, she would have gained... knowledge and experience enough to operate it just to the level of writing that particular weather app. Though having done that, it's still unreasonable to now believe she could then use the LLM to write a bytecode compiler, because other people who have a Ph.D. in CS can. The LLM doesn't level the playing field, it's still lopsided toward the Ph.D.s / senior devs with 20 years exp.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#236

Post by airstrike »

plufz wrote: post #225
airstrike wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see, and I definitely agree with that last statement. It tends to rewrite stuff. I feel like it should pay me back 10,000 tokens each time it increases the API surface

Re: The highest quality codebase

#237

Post by mjr00 »

skydhash wrote: post #231
mjr00 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The impact is that now, if you want to modify the project in some way, you will need to learn Go. It's like all the codebases in COBOL. Maybe COBOL at that time was the best language for the product, but now, it's not that easy to find someone with the knowledge to maintain the system. As soon as you make a choice, you accept that further down the line, there will be some X cost to keep going in that direction and so…

> The impact is that now, if you want to modify the project in some way, you will need to learn Go.

That's tautologically true, yes, but your claim was

> 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.

So, assuming the domain of infrastructure-at-code is mostly known now which is a fair statement -- which is a better choice, Go or Rust, and why? Remember, this is objective fact, not art, so no personal preferences are allowed.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#238

Post by jessoteric »

georgemcbay wrote: post #131
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I sometimes use AI for questions like "is it possible to do [x] using library [y] and if so, how?" and have received mostly solid answers.

> Yeah, I sometimes use AI for questions like "is it possible to do [x] using library [y] and if so, how?" and have received mostly solid answers. In my experience most LLMs are going to answer this with some form of "Absolutely!" and then propose a square-peg-into-a-round-hole way to do it that is likely suboptimal vs using a different library that is far more suited to your problem if you didn't guess the right fit…

IME this has been significantly reduced in newer models like 4.5 Opus and to a lesser extent Sonnet, but agree it's still sort of bad- mainly because the question you're posing is bad.

if you ask a human this the answer can also often be "yes [if we torture the library]", because software development is magic and magic is the realm of imagination.

much better prompt: "is this library designed to solve this problem" or "how can we solve this problem? i am considering using this library to do so, is that realistic?"

Re: The highest quality codebase

#239

Post by jessoteric »

tayo42 wrote: post #77
pdntspa wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me writing code is me spending 3/4 of my time wading through documentation and google searches. It's absolutely hell on my ADD. My ability to memorize is absolutely garbage. Throughout my career I've worked in like 10 different languages, and in any given project I'm usually working in at least 3 or 4. There's a lot of "now what is a map operation in this stupid fucking language called again?!" Claude writing code ge…

How do you end up with 3 to 4 languages in one project?

i find it's pretty rare to have a project that only consists of one or two languages, over a certain complexity/feature threshold

Re: The highest quality codebase

#240

Post by eclipxe »

agumonkey wrote: post #224
pdntspa wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Yes?
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