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Various LLM Smells

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Re: Various LLM Smells

#291

Post by ruszki »

lukan wrote: post #244
ruszki wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen people coding for 4 decades, thinking the same as you about themselves, and were bad coders. Unfortunately, nobody can tell you whether you’re good or bad without seeing your code. Your claims means nothing on the internet.

What about the buisness side of things that does not care for shiny code, but shipping things to make money? That simple arcade game (without in game transactions) needs to be fun, that website that needs to attract visitors (but not sell them anything or handle sensitive data)? They don't care about abstract code quality, they care if it works and useful. So a good coder here means he or she could get to working res…

> And some can do both - but they are very rare, in my experience.

As far as I know basically all of the successful software companies had these quite early. Of course, you need other kinds of people too. And not everybody needs to be like that. But you absolutely need those kind of people.

But if you give me a few examples where this was not the case, and not recently, or during the dot com boom, where hype overwrote everything, then I’ll change my mind.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#292

Post by ruszki »

ted_bunny wrote: post #273
ruszki wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen people coding for 4 decades, thinking the same as you about themselves, and were bad coders. Unfortunately, nobody can tell you whether you’re good or bad without seeing your code. Your claims means nothing on the internet.

That's why they mentioned that their software was successful, it wasn't intended as idle bragging.

That can still easily mean that they didn’t give any value or minuscule amount of value to the project which caused their success.

The most successful projects which I’ve seen closely, all of them had only a few people who mattered, everybody else could be replaced at any given time basically, without a real impact. All of the failing ones were those in which those people didn’t exist, or were too few of them. This is exponentially more important in early phases of projects.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#293

Post by ValentineC »

OhSoHumble wrote: post #102
ryandrake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have…

I've caught Claude Code generating some pretty egregious security vulnerabilities. I'm using it to build an AI RPG site and the goal is to use web assembly as a bridge between author submitted code and LLMs in order to help shore up state management at the game level. The language that I picked for the game runtime is Python. Claude really thought that the best way to validate user submitted Python was to bypass the…

> Business logic is disconnected. It's why agentically produced codebases are MUCH larger than they should be; every feature is developed in a vacuum.

I just had Opus 4.7 build a feature twice, because it didn't close a ticket the first time. (I'm trying to solo-build a fairly large greenfield project, and am at the point where I let it go ham over my codebase because of the scale of things.)

I then spent a couple of hours asking it to compare the features. It argued that they were completely different features for a while, then eventually acquiesced and said that they were redundant.

That's a couple of thousands of tokens and time I'm never going to get back.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#294

Post by galangalalgol »

thegrim33 wrote: post #287
ryandrake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have…

I came up with an analogy the other day - The 'camp 1' people in the pre-LLM days were probably the ones that often just copy+pasted code from SO they didn't really understand, but since the code seemed to work when they ran it, they thought it was all fine and continued on. Whereas the 'camp 2' people when trying to find an answer to something, discarded 99% of SO and other similar answers, having the knowledge to s…

Being faster than humans at mundane and verifiable tasks is a useful thing. Great for format conversions. Api mappings etc. if you don't understand the algorithm you are asking it to implement, you better at least understand how to generate a large set of correct input and output pairs yourself, because it will absolutely make stuff up and adjust the test cases to pass.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#296

Post by YZF »

ruszki wrote: post #212
YZF wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree this is the source of the polarization. Maybe it's part of it. I have been coding since about 1983 or so. I shipped high quality products that have been used by millions of people. From embedded software to desktop applications to distributed systems. I don't think I'm in the "don't understand what code should look like camp" (I mean you never know but the evidence seems to show that I do know what I'm doi…

I’ve seen people coding for 4 decades, thinking the same as you about themselves, and were bad coders. Unfortunately, nobody can tell you whether you’re good or bad without seeing your code. Your claims means nothing on the internet.

I'm just trying to provide useful context. I can claim anything and you don't know me either way. Last I checked other than your peers (which you can imagine I've had) there is no subjective "stamp" for good vs. bad. Many people who have shipped nothing and have no experience think they're great coders as well.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#297

Post by YZF »

ruszki wrote: post #292
ted_bunny wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why they mentioned that their software was successful, it wasn't intended as idle bragging.

That can still easily mean that they didn’t give any value or minuscule amount of value to the project which caused their success. The most successful projects which I’ve seen closely, all of them had only a few people who mattered, everybody else could be replaced at any given time basically, without a real impact. All of the failing ones were those in which those people didn’t exist, or were too few of them. This i…

fwiw I wrote key features/pieces of pretty much everything I worked on. I was more or less the technical lead (and later engineering manager) on all the software I shipped.

It seems people really want to not believe AI can be useful for strong developers. That's fine. I don't really have a bone in this game, I'm anonymous here, and people can think whatever they choose to ;)

Re: Various LLM Smells

#298

Post by ruszki »

YZF wrote: post #297
ruszki wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can still easily mean that they didn’t give any value or minuscule amount of value to the project which caused their success. The most successful projects which I’ve seen closely, all of them had only a few people who mattered, everybody else could be replaced at any given time basically, without a real impact. All of the failing ones were those in which those people didn’t exist, or were too few of them. This i…

fwiw I wrote key features/pieces of pretty much everything I worked on. I was more or less the technical lead (and later engineering manager) on all the software I shipped. It seems people really want to not believe AI can be useful for strong developers. That's fine. I don't really have a bone in this game, I'm anonymous here, and people can think whatever they choose to ;)

Anonymity is a two way thing. Maybe, I don't need to use "more or less". Maybe, I'm an ultra heavy user of AI. It's even possible that I'm magnitudes better developer in every single aspects.

Maybe not.

I'm just waiting for somebody who send me code, which was generated by AI, not overwritten almost completely, and it's not shit. The funny thing is that some people here were so convinced that AI is great, that they recorded how they work with AI. And two things:

- They were slower than manual copy pasting

- They still somehow introduced bugs, and very suboptimal solutions...

Also, it would be good, that anybody could show me anything, that shows, how people became not terrible with code review suddenly. Because before AI, it was a common knowledge, that almost everybody was bad with it, and people rarely did it properly, because it was considered annoying, and not because they were useless. There were jokes about rewriting things, exactly because of the same reasons, and they heavily based on reality. And suddenly, we pretend that this changed.

And somehow you should really would need to convince me that the 100s of thousands of lines of code which I generated with AI in the past years, somehow, it's better than what it is. But I'm sure, that it's easier to assume that I didn't try something, than showing only once what "good" means in this case. Unfortunately, there is nothing similar here, than for example "Groovy is a great programming language", which is a dead giveaway that whoever said that is not just bad developer, but somebody who I would fire immediately from every single project to which I'm related to. Especially if they are tech lead. But there are such people, and some of them would claim the same thing as you. // Obviously interns and juniors can think whatever they want. They are labeled as such, because they cannot know yet.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#299

Post by YZF »

ruszki wrote: post #298
YZF wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fwiw I wrote key features/pieces of pretty much everything I worked on. I was more or less the technical lead (and later engineering manager) on all the software I shipped. It seems people really want to not believe AI can be useful for strong developers. That's fine. I don't really have a bone in this game, I'm anonymous here, and people can think whatever they choose to ;)

Anonymity is a two way thing. Maybe, I don't need to use "more or less". Maybe, I'm an ultra heavy user of AI. It's even possible that I'm magnitudes better developer in every single aspects. Maybe not. I'm just waiting for somebody who send me code, which was generated by AI, not overwritten almost completely, and it's not shit. The funny thing is that some people here were so convinced that AI is great, that they r…

What I do at work is (obviously) not something I can share.

Groovy ;) You must love Jenkins. At least I can rest at ease you won't fire me for that infraction. I used C and C++ most of my career and more recently Go (which I really loved when it was created but my take is a bit more nuanced these days after seeing a really large code base evolve over years).

I'm confused though. You generated 100s of thousands of lines of code using AI and you think it's crap? The code AI generates for me is not some pinnacle of software engineering. It is repeating existing patterns or fairly simple concepts. I treat AI like an quick intern that scales infinitely (or a junior developer). And yes, juniors and interns don't write the best code but in many organizations there is still a fair amount of code written by them.

The thing is that in a large team/project (and the one I'm on has hundreds of developers of various skill levels) there's an endless backlog of things that can be improved including relatively easy features or refactoring. The constraints are either organizational or time. AI enables these things to get done with very little overhead so that's a net positive. It moves the needle for how much time/effort does it take to address "not that hard" issues and with proper prompting and examples it does a decent job. The bar isn't code that John Carmack would write in a week, the bar is improving a certain crappy area of the code to be more reliable or more performant or a little bit cleaner. This is life for most software projects. Yes, in a perfect world every software project is perfection. And maybe some organizations are able to approximate that.

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