Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to effectively write quality code with AI

heidenstedt.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 321 posts

Re: How to effectively write quality code with AI

#281

Post by cyber_kinetist »

agumonkey wrote: post #11
OptionOfT wrote: post #2

I wonder at the end of this if it's the still worth the risk? A lot of how I form my thoughts is driven by writing code, and seeing it on screen, running into its limitations. Maybe it's the kind of work I'm doing, or maybe I just suck, but the code to me is a forcing mechanism into ironing out the details, and I don't get that when I'm writing a specification.

I second this. This* is the matter against which we form understanding. This here is the work at hand, our own notes, discussions we have with people, the silent walk where our brain kinda process errors and ideas .. it's always been like this since i was a kid, playing with construction toys. I never ever wanted somebody to play while I wait to evaluate if it fits my desires. Desires that often come from playing. Ou…

Actually for me it was the opposite: before I wasn't able to play around and experiment in my free time that much, because I didn't have enough energy left to actualize the thoughts and ideas I have since I have a day job.

Now, since the bottleneck of moving the fingers to write code has gone down, I actually started to enjoy doing side projects. The mental stress from writing code has gone down drastically with Claude Code, and I feel the urge to create more nowadays!

Re: How to effectively write quality code with AI

#282

Post by dickersnoodle »

agumonkey wrote: post #11
OptionOfT wrote: post #2

I wonder at the end of this if it's the still worth the risk? A lot of how I form my thoughts is driven by writing code, and seeing it on screen, running into its limitations. Maybe it's the kind of work I'm doing, or maybe I just suck, but the code to me is a forcing mechanism into ironing out the details, and I don't get that when I'm writing a specification.

I second this. This* is the matter against which we form understanding. This here is the work at hand, our own notes, discussions we have with people, the silent walk where our brain kinda process errors and ideas .. it's always been like this since i was a kid, playing with construction toys. I never ever wanted somebody to play while I wait to evaluate if it fits my desires. Desires that often come from playing. Ou…

>I see people at work who are drooling about being able to have code made for them .. but I'm not in that group.

+100 for this.

Re: How to effectively write quality code with AI

#283

Post by lenkite »

emsign wrote: post #35

Sounds like an awful lot of work and nannying just to avoid writing code yourself. Coding used to be fun and enjoyable once...

Also there is no "compiler" and "type checker" for your SPEC. If you get something wrong in some paragraph somewhere and or contradict something in your spec X paragraphs later - you have to use Mark-1 EyeBall to detect and fix this.

You have just transformed your job from developer to manual spec maintainer - a clerk who has to painstakingly check everything.

Re: How to effectively write quality code with AI

#284

Post by jghn »

gtirloni wrote: post #280

Spec-driven development is the only reliable way to work with AI. That's my current understanding. I spend more time refining the spec and bouncing ideas off of AI/team than before, which is good before there can't be any incorrect assumptions or hidden variables, otherwise AI will create suboptimal code. We should have been doing this much earlier in the process, even without AI, but now it's more necessary than eve…

Sentiments like this make me wonder if perhaps the dream of the 90s was just ahead of its time. Things like UML, 4GLs, Rational were all being hyped. We were told that the future was a world where people could express the requirements & shape of the system, and the machines would do the rest.

Clearly that didn't happen, and then agile took over from the more waterfall/specs based approaches, and the rest was history.

But now we're entering a world where the state of the art is expressing your requirements & shape of the system. Perhaps this is just part of a broader pendulum swing, or perhaps the 1990s hopes & dreams finally caught up with technology.

Re: How to effectively write quality code with AI

#285

Post by agumonkey »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #281
agumonkey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this. This* is the matter against which we form understanding. This here is the work at hand, our own notes, discussions we have with people, the silent walk where our brain kinda process errors and ideas .. it's always been like this since i was a kid, playing with construction toys. I never ever wanted somebody to play while I wait to evaluate if it fits my desires. Desires that often come from playing. Ou…

Actually for me it was the opposite: before I wasn't able to play around and experiment in my free time that much, because I didn't have enough energy left to actualize the thoughts and ideas I have since I have a day job. Now, since the bottleneck of moving the fingers to write code has gone down, I actually started to enjoy doing side projects. The mental stress from writing code has gone down drastically with Clau…

you have a point.. i'm still confused about how this will affect jobs, markets

in a way a personal project is different from a job duty, here you're exploring, less if no deadline.. at work if I feel the llm is doing everything and I don't really master, i risk my job and my skills rot.

Re: How to effectively write quality code with AI

#286

Post by agumonkey »

samiv wrote: post #263
agumonkey wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I'm well aware of this. I admitted defeat in a way.. I can't compete. I'm just at loss, and unless LLM stall and break for some reason (ai bubble, enshittification..) I don't see a future for me in "software" in a few years.

I feel the same. And I expect even a lot of the early adopters and AI enthusiasts are going to find themselves as the short end of the stick sooner than later. "Oops I automated myself out a job".

I've already seen this play out. The lazies in our floor were all crazy about AI because they could finally work few and finish their tasks. Until they realized that they were visibly replaceable now. The motto in team chats is "we'll lie about the productivity gains to management, just say 10% but with lots of caretaking" now

Re: How to effectively write quality code with AI

#288

Post by 9dev »

vbezhenar wrote: post #155
9dev wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI just means more output will be expected of you, and they'll keep pushing you to work as hard as you can. That’s a bit too cynical for me. After all, yes, your boss is not paying you for sipping lattes, but for producing value for the company. If there is a tool that maximises your output, why wouldn’t he want you to use that to great efficiency? Put differently, would a carpenter shop accept employees rejecting…

> why wouldn’t he want you to use that to great efficiency Because I deny that? It's not fun for me. > would a carpenter shop accept employees rejecting the power saw in favour of a hand saw to retain their artisanal capability? Why not? If that makes enough money to keep going. You might argue that in theoretical ideal market companies who're not utilizing every possible trick to improve productivity (including AI)…

> Because I deny that? It's not fun for me.

I totally emphasise as a fellow developer, but I doubt you realise what an incredibly privileged position it is to just refuse working if you don't have fun doing it. And it doesn't really make for a convincing argument to keep you employed either.

> Why not? If that makes enough money to keep going.

If all other competing carpenters use power tools, you're going to loose contracts. We've had a few incredibly easy decades as software developers where market pressure wasn't really a thing, but that is about to change when the cost of producing code drops considerably.

> You might argue that in theoretical ideal market companies who're not utilizing every possible trick to improve productivity (including AI) will lose competition […]

You're moving the goalposts here. We're not talking about wringing every last drop of efficiency out of employees. We're talking about businesses not tolerating paying for licenses for AI agents to enable developers to sip Lattés while their computer does their job. That's a fundamentally different proposition.

Re: How to effectively write quality code with AI

#289

Post by ebhn »

aenis wrote: post #234

I'd add: Religiously, routinely refactor. After almost every feature I do a feature level code analysis and refactoring, and every few features - codebase wide code analysis and refactoring. I am quite happy with the resulting code - much less shameful than most things I've created in 40 years of being passionate about coding.

This is the main thing I have learned too. I've been building an internal tool for myself to annotate lines in each commit diff as good (green) / needs refactor (yellow) / needs rewrite (red) and it has helped me keep track of this kind of tech debt. Basically does what you could do with "TODO refactor" comments all over, but is more comprehensive and doesn't litter your source code. Plan to open source it once I've dog-fooded it a little more

Re: How to effectively write quality code with AI

#290

Post by gombosg »

whynotminot wrote: post #58
falloutx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its only revolutionary if you think engineers were slow before or software was not being delivered fast enough. Its revolutionary for some people sure, but everyone is in a different situation, so one man's trash can be other man's treasure. Most people are treading both paths as automation threatens their livelihood and work they loved, also still not able to understand why would people pay to companies that are act…

Of course software hasn’t been delivered fast enough. There is so so so much of the world that still needs high quality software.

I think there are four fundamental issues here for us...

1. There are actually less software jobs out there, with huge layoffs still going on, so software engineering as a profession doesn't seem to profit from AI.

2. The remaining engineers are expected by their employers to ship more. Even if they can manage that using AI, there will be higher pressure and higher stress on them, which makes their work less fulfilling, more prone to burnout etc.

3. Tied to the previous - this increases workism, measuring people, engineers by some output benchmark alone, treating them more like factory workers instead of expert, free-thinking individuals (often with higher education degrees). Which again degrades this profession as a whole.

3. Measuring developer productivity hasn't really been cracked before either, and still after AI, there is not a lot of real data proving that these tools actually make us more productive, whatever that may be. There is only anecdotal evidence: I did this in X time, when it would have taken me otherwise Y time - but at the same time it's well known that estimating software delivery timelines is next to impossible, meaning, the estimation of "Y" is probably flawed.

So a lot of things going on apart from "the world will surely need more software".

Post reply on HN