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AI makes tech debt more expensive

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Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#241

Post by hunterbrooks »

perrygeo wrote: post #6

> Companies with relatively young, high-quality codebases benefit the most from generative AI tools, while companies with gnarly, legacy codebases will struggle to adopt them. In other words, the penalty for having a ‘high-debt’ codebase is now larger than ever. This mirrors my experience using LLMs on personal projects. They can provide good advice only to the extent that your project stays within the bounds of well…

LLM's get relatively better at read-heavy operations (ex: code review) than write-heavy operations (ex: code generation) as codebases become less idiomatic.

I'm a cofounder at www.ellipsis.dev - we tried to build code generation for a LONG time before we realized that AI Code Review is way more doable with SOTA

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#242

Post by skydhash »

dartos wrote: post #232
valenterry wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly that. LLMs generate a lot of simple and dumb code fast. Then you need to refactor it and you can't because LLMs are still very bad at that. They can only refactor locally with a very limited scope, not globally. Good luck to anyone having to maintain legacy LLM-generated codebases in the future, I won't.

I’ve noticed LLMs quickly turn to pulling in dependencies and making complicated code

I'm sure they do great for scripts and other stuff. But the few times I tried, they always go for the most complicated solutions. I prefer my scripts to grow organically. Why automate something if I don't even know how it's done in the first place? (Unless someone else is maintaining the solution)

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#243

Post by namaria »

perrygeo wrote: post #183
zer8k wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the model chokes, starts hallucinating, and makes your job considerably harder. Coincidentally this also happens with developers in unfamiliar territory.

I often think of LLMs as a really smart junior developer - full of answers, half correct, with zero wisdom but 100% confidence I'd like to think most developers know how to say "I don't know, let's do some research" but in reality, many probably just take a similar approach to the LLM - feign competence and just hack out whatever is needed for today's goal, don't worry about tomorrow.

Nah LLMs are nothing like really smart junior developers.

Really smart junior developers actually have a shot at learning better and moving on from this stage.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#244

Post by inSenCite »

physicles wrote: post #190
inSenCite wrote: post #168

On one hand I agree with this conceptually, but on the other hand I've also been able to use AI to rapidly clean up and better structure a bunch of my existing code. The blind copy-paste has generally been a bad idea though. Still need to read the code spit out, ask for explanations, do some iterating.

Do you mind getting into specifics about how you've been using AI to restructure your code? What tools are you using, and how large is the code base you're working with?

Using a combination of both chatgpt and claude/sonnet. Codebase is not very complex or cutting edge (e.g., data pipeline to maintain a local db, and an analytics system). These are not enterprise or even public facing applications.

For additional context I have not been a software engineer professionally for over a decade but still am in the engineering field.

Usually I will feed in a few functions (or just 1), sometimes a whole module if it small enough, and prompt it for general performance, and maintainability improvements. I just kinda iterate from there. I also restart chats often

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#245

Post by suzzer99 »

bunderbunder wrote: post #233
suzzer99 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got really 'lucky' in that the first major project I ever worked on was future-proofed to high heaven, and I became the one to maintain that thing for a few years as none of the expected needs for multiple layers of future-proofing abstraction came to pass. Oh but if we ever wanted to switch from Oracle to Sybase, it would have been 30% easier with our database connection factory! I never let that happen again.

IME that kind of thing is more likely to make it 300% harder. This idea of easy, worry-free database replatforming strikes me as kind of a shibboleth for identifying people who’ve never done it before. In reality they all have subtle differences in semantics and query optimization behavior that mean that every touch point needs close attention to make sure you understand how the behavior in that part of the system ch…

It was even more ludicrous in this case because a ton of the app logic was inside stored procedures.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#246

Post by sarchertech »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #240
sarchertech wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your original point was that it was great to “write some code then send it to the LLM to create tests.” That’s not test driven development.

Sure if you want to take the absolute least charitable interpretation of what I said lol.

“write a piece of code with the reward being the ability to send it to the LLM to create some tests and then seeing a nice stream of green checkmarks”

You write code, then you send the code to the LLM to create tests for you.

How can this possibly be interpreted to mean the reverse?

That you write tests first by asking the LLM in English to help you without “sending the code” you wrote because you haven’t written it yet. Then you use those tests to help you write the code.

Now if you misspoke then my comment isn’t relevant to your situation, but don’t pretend that I somehow interpreted what you said uncharitably. There’s no other way to interpret it.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#247

Post by MarcelOlsz »

sarchertech wrote: post #246
MarcelOlsz wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure if you want to take the absolute least charitable interpretation of what I said lol.

“write a piece of code with the reward being the ability to send it to the LLM to create some tests and then seeing a nice stream of green checkmarks” You write code, then you send the code to the LLM to create tests for you. How can this possibly be interpreted to mean the reverse? That you write tests first by asking the LLM in English to help you without “sending the code” you wrote because you haven’t written it…

Ok you win.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#248

Post by sarchertech »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #247
sarchertech wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“write a piece of code with the reward being the ability to send it to the LLM to create some tests and then seeing a nice stream of green checkmarks” You write code, then you send the code to the LLM to create tests for you. How can this possibly be interpreted to mean the reverse? That you write tests first by asking the LLM in English to help you without “sending the code” you wrote because you haven’t written it…

Ok you win.

Thanks
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