Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. It can do structured problems very well, and it can transform unstructured data very well, but it can't deal with unstructured problems very well. While this is true in my experience, the opposite is not true. LLMs are very good at helping me go through a structure processing of thinking about architectural a…
I've checked the linked page and there's nothing about even learning the domain or learning the tech platform you're going to use. It's all blind faith, just a small step above copying stuff from GitHub or StackOverflow and pushing it to prod.
The highest quality codebase
271–280 of 409 posts
Re: The highest quality codebase
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
He means that it is heavily biased to write code, not remove, condense, refactor, etc. It wants to generate more stuff, not less.
I don't see why this would be the case.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crafting code can be self-indulgent since most common patterns have been implemented multiple times in multiple languages. A lot of time the craft oriented developer will reject an existing implementation because it doesn't match their sensibilities. There is absolutely a role for craft, however the amount of craft truly needed in modern development is not as large as people would like. There are lots of well crafted…
As someone who does that a lot... I agree. Self-indulgent is the word. It just feels great when the implementation is a perfect fit for your brain, but sometimes that's just not a good use of your time. Sometimes, you strike gold, so there's that.
And I do think there's more to it than preference. Like there's actual bugs in the code, it's confusing and because it's confusing there's more bugs. It's solving a simple problem but doing so in an unnecessarily convoluted way. I can solve the same problem in a much simpler way. But because everything is like this I can't just fix it, there's layers and layers of this convolution that can't just be fixed and of course there's no proper decoupling etc so a refactor is kind of all or nothing. If you start it's like pulling on a thread and everything just unravels.
This is going to sound pompous and terrible but honestly some times I feel like I'm too much better than other developers. I have a hard time collaborating because the only thing I really want to do with other people's code is delete it and rewrite it. I can't fix it because it isn't fixable, it's just trash. I wish they would have talked to me before writing it, I could have helped then.
Obviously in order to function in a professional environment i have to suppress this stuff and just let the code be ass but it really irks me. Especially if I need to build on something someone else made - itsalmost always ass, I don't want to build on a crooked foundation. I want to fix the foundation so the rest of the building can be good too. But there's no time and it's exhausting fixing everyone else's messes all the time.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#274One of my favorite personal evals for llms is testing its stability as a reviewer. The basic gist of it is to give the llm some code to review and have it assign a grade multiple times. How much variance is there in the grade? Then, prompt the same llm to be a "critical" reviewer with the same code multiple times. How much does that average critical grade change? A low variance of grades across many generations and a…
How is this different than testing the temperature?
Re: The highest quality codebase
#275Claude 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…
When I see my colleagues use an LLM they are treating it like a mind reader and their prompts are, frankly, dogshit.
It shows that articulating a problem is an important skill.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Result pattern also works exceptionally well with C#, provided you ensure that code returning a Result object never throws an exception. Of course, there are still some exceptional things that can throw, but this is essentially the same situation as dealing with Rust panics.
IMO, Rust panics should kill the application... C# errors shouldn't. Also, in practice, in C# where I was dealing with Result, there was just as much chance of seeing an actual thrown error, so you always had to deal with both an explicit error result AND thrown errors in practice... it was worse than just error patterns with type specific catch blocks.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#277Claude 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…
Re: The highest quality codebase
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who does that a lot... I agree. Self-indulgent is the word. It just feels great when the implementation is a perfect fit for your brain, but sometimes that's just not a good use of your time. Sometimes, you strike gold, so there's that.
I kind of struggle with this. I basically hate everyone elses code, and by that I mean I hate most people's code. A lot of people write awesome code but most people write what I'd call trash code. And I do think there's more to it than preference. Like there's actual bugs in the code, it's confusing and because it's confusing there's more bugs. It's solving a simple problem but doing so in an unnecessarily convoluted…
Re: The highest quality codebase
#279Claude 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…
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…
Principles like DRY
Re: The highest quality codebase
#280This is a great example of there being no intelligence under the hood.
Would a human perform very differently? A human who must obey orders (like maybe they are paid to follow the prompt). With some "magnitude of work" enforced at each step. I'm not sure there's much to learn here, besides it's kinda fun, since no real human was forced to suffer through this exercise on the implementor side.
A human with no traning will perform worse.