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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#241

Post by Gigachad »

csallen wrote: post #55
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

I'll take the other side of this. Professional software engineers like many of us have a big blind spot when it comes to AI coding, and that's a fixation on code quality. It makes sense to focus on code quality. We're not wrong. After all, we've spent our entire careers in the code. Bad code quality slows us down and makes things slow/insecure/unreliable/etc for end users. However, code quality is becoming less and l…

I’ve been told repeatedly now that if AI coding isn’t working for me it’s because my projects code quality is too poor so the agents can’t understand it.

Now I’m being told code quality doesn’t matter at all.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#242

Post by deadbabe »

figassis wrote: post #91
yojo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 I’ve been driving Claude as my primary coding interface the last three months at my job. Other than a different domain, I feel like I could have written this exact article. The project I’m on started as a vibe-coded prototype that quickly got promoted to a production service we sell. I’ve had to build the mental model after the fact, while refactoring and ripping out large chunks of nonsense or dead code. But the…

My process: start ideating and get the AI to poke holes in your reasoning, your vision, scalability, etc. do this for a few days while taking breaks. This is all contained in one Md file with mermaid diagrams and sections. Then use ideation to architect, dive into details and tell the AI exactly what your choices are, how certain methods should be called, how logging and observability should be setup, what language t…

LISTEN/NOTIFY is not brittle, we use it for millions of events per day.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#243

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

csallen wrote: post #60
vlovich123 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Strong disagree. I just watched a team spend weeks trying to make a piece of code work with AI because the vibe coded was spaghetti garbage that even the AI couldn’t tell what needed to be done and was basically playing…

Okay, so you observed one team that had an issue with AI code quality. What's your point? In 1998, I'm sure there were newspaper companies who failed at transitioning online, didn't get any web traffic, had unreliable servers crashed, etc. This says very little about what life would be like for the newspaper industry in 1999, 2000, 2005, 2010, and beyond.

The newspaper industry is the perfect analogy, because it is effectively dead. Wholesale dead. Here and there, the biggest, most world-renowned papers are still alive, on life-support... NYT, WSJ, etc. But they're all dead. Their death has caused the absolute destruction of an entire industry sector and has given gangrene to adjacent industries that they will soon succumb to. The point about 1998 wasn't that there was this transition that demanded careful attention and wise strategy, but that death was coming for it no matter what anyone did to stop it.

The death of newspapers is quite the spectacle too. No one seems to understand how bad it is... the youngest generation can't even seem to recognize that anything is missing. We've effectively amateurized journalism so that only grifters and talentless hacks want to attempt it, and only in tiny little soundbites on Twitter or other social media (and they're quickly finding out how it might be more lucrative to do propaganda for foreign governments or MLM charlatanism). When the death of the software industry is complete, it too will have been completely amateurized, the youngest generation will not even appreciate that people used to make it for a living, and the few amateurs doing it will start to comprehend how much more lucrative it will be to just make poorly disguised malware.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#244

Post by dpkirchner »

camdenreslink wrote: post #104
yojo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 I’ve been driving Claude as my primary coding interface the last three months at my job. Other than a different domain, I feel like I could have written this exact article. The project I’m on started as a vibe-coded prototype that quickly got promoted to a production service we sell. I’ve had to build the mental model after the fact, while refactoring and ripping out large chunks of nonsense or dead code. But the…

I’ve found that LLMs will frequently do extremely silly things that no person would do to make typescript code pass the typechecker.

I caught it using Parameters[2] the other day. It wanted to avoid importing a type, so it did this nonsense. (I might have the syntax slightly wrong here, I'm writing from memory.)

But it's not all bad news. TIL about Parameters.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#245

Post by skydhash »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #225
devmor wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get better at something without understanding why, but you should be able to think about it and determine why fairly easily. This is something everyone who cares about improving in a skill does regularly - examine their improvement, the reasons behind it, and how to add to them. That’s the basis of self-driven learning.

This is an absurd statement. There are many complex undertakings in sport where even the very best get better with practice and can't tell you why. In fact, the ones who think they can tell you why are the one's to be most skeptical of. You are just making stuff up or regurgitating material from a pop science book.

They can't tell you (not everyone is eloquent), but they sure know why. Struggling to put something in word is not the same as not knowing.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#247

Post by nickstinemates »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

There is a lot you can do to shape the end result to not have these faults. In the end, the engineering mind and rigor still needs to apply, so the hard work doesn't go away.

But, the errors that are described - no architecture adhesion, lack of comprehension, random files, etc. are a matter of not leveling up the sophistication of use further, not a gap in those tools.

As an example. Very clearly laying out your architecture principles, guidance, how code should look on disk, theory on imports, etc. And then - objectively analyzing any proposed change against those principles, converges toward sane and understandable.

We've been calling it adversarial testing across a number of dimensions - architecture, security, accessibility, among other things. Every pr gets automatically reviewed and scored based on these perspectives. If an adversary doesn't OK the PR, it doesn't get merged.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#248

Post by skydhash »

csallen wrote: post #200
pessimizer wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what this flood of personal-use software is that you think normal people want to produce. Normal people don't even think about software doing a thing until they see an advertisement about software that does a thing. And then they'd rather pay 10 bucks for it than to invent a shittier version of it themselves for $500. And I'm not being condescending about normal people. Developers often don't think abo…

Go look at the numbers from Lovable and Replit and Claude Code and similar companies. Quite staggering. I myself have run an online community for early-stage startup founders for over a decade. The number of ambitious people who would love to build something but don't know how to code and in the last year or two have started cranking out applications is tremendous. That number is far higher than the number of softwar…

That's very much an echo chamber you find yourself in. I'm far away from any technological center and the main use of LLM for people is the web search widget, spell checking and generating letters. Also kids cheating on their homework.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#249

Post by skydhash »

bdangubic wrote: post #90
marhee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering is only about 20% writing code (the famous 40-20-40 split). Most people use it only for the first 40%, and very succesfully (im in that camp). If you use it to write your code you can theorettically maybe get 20% time improvement initially, but you loose a lot of time later redoing it or unraveling. Not worth bothering.

20% is one of those cool lies SWEs have been able to push through (like “our jobs are oh so very special we can’t really estimate it, we’ll create an entire sub-industries with our industry to make sure everyone knows we can’t estimate”). SWEs spend 20% of the time writing code for exactly the same reason brick-layers spend 20% of their time laying bricks

The other 80% is spent on the following:

- A lot of research. Libraries documentation, best practice, sample solutions, code history,... That could be easily 60% of the time. Even when you're familiar with the project, you're always checking other parts of the codebase and your notes.

- Communication. Most projects involve a team and there's a dependency graph between your work. There may be also a project manager dictating things and support that wants your input on some cases.

- Thinking. Code is just the written version of a solution. The latter needs to exists first. So you spend a lot of time wrangling with the problem and trying to balance tradeoffs. It also involves a lot of the other points.

Coding is a breeze compared to the others. And if you have setup a good environment, it's even enjoyable.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#250

Post by skydhash »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #181
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already know how to drive stick (trad coding), I don’t feel like I’m gaining much by switching to automatic transmission.

Yeah that's not the difference, lol. With AI coding you can get the same work done in an order of magnitude less time, without even knowing how to program . The only comparison I can come up with is 3D printers, but even that's not as ridiculously fast and easy as AI coding. An average person can ask an agent to write a program, in any popular language, and it'll do it, and it'll work. We still need people intelligen…

Most people that don't know how to program have no real desire in coding with AI (unless to pose as a SWE and get that sweet money). Most of them don't even like computers. Yes they do some tasks on it, but they're not that attached to the tool and its capabilities.
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