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AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

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Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#301

Post by mexicocitinluez »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #64
socketcluster wrote: post #27

I think AI is just a massive force multiplier. If your codebase has bad foundation and going in the wrong direction with lots of hacks, it will just write code which mirrors the existing style... And you get exactly was OP is suggesting. If however, your code foundations are good and highly consistent and never allow hacks, then the AI will maintain that clean style and it becomes shockingly good; in this case, the p…

A tangent, I keep hearing this good base, but I've never seen one, not in the real world. No projects, unless it's only you working on it, only yourself as the client, and is so rigid in it's scope, it's frankly useless, will have this mythical base. Over time the needs change, there's no sticking to the plan. Often it's a change that requires rethinking a major part. What we loathe as tight coupling was just efficie…

> No projects, unless it's only you working on it, only yourself as the client, and is so rigid in it's scope, it's frankly useless, will have this mythical base.

This is naive. I've been building an EMR in the healthcare space for 5 years now as part of an actual provider. We've incrementally released small chunks when they're ready. The codebase I've built is the most consistent codebase I've ever been a part of.

It's bureaucracy AND government process AND constantly changing priorities and regulations and requirements from insurance providers all wrapped up into one. And as such, we have to take our time.

Go and tell the clinicians currently using it that it's not useful. I'm sure they won't agree.

> Perfectly architected code vs code that does the thing have no real world difference

This just flat out isn't true. Just because YOU haven't experience it (and I think you're quite frankly telling on yourself with this) doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all.

> Because you yourself had to choose between time/opportunity vs your ideals and you chose wrong.

Like I said above, you're telling on yourself. I'm not saying I've never been in this situation, but I am saying that it's not the only way to build software.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#302

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bonesss wrote: post #225
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. I just did my first “AI native coding project”. Both because for now I haven’t run into any quotas using Codex CLI with my $20/month ChatGPT subscription and the company just gave everyone an $800/month Claude allowance. Before I even started the implementation I: 1. Put the initial sales contract with the business requirements. 2. Notes I got from talking to sales 3. The transcript of the initial…

> Can you say that about any project that was done before GenAI? … a project with a decomposition of top level tasks, minutes and meeting notes, a transcript, initial diagrams, a bunch of loose transcripts on soon to be outdated assumptions and design, and then a soon-to-be-outdated living and constantly modified AGENT file that will be to some extent added to some context and to some extent ignored and to some exten…

Absolutely no developer is going to search through issue trackers. Are you comparing that to while you are actually in your terminal telling the agent at to update the file with what you are doing and why?

How many developers actually want to ruin their flow and use a bloated CRM or Jira that has some type of inane workflow set up by the PMO compared to just staying in the terminal.

If there is any change to the initial contract, there is change order - you put that through the same workflow.

And do you really want to use how the government works as the model of efficiency? No, this is coming from a right wing government hater or libertarian that says we don’t need government. But I’ve worked in the pub sec department of consulting (AWS ProServe WWPS).

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#303

Post by burnerToBetOut »

jama211 wrote: post #278

This article has some serious usage of either bad prompting, or terrible models, or they’re referencing the past with their stories. I have experience AI’s deleting things they shouldn’t but not since like, the gpt4 days. But that put aside, I don’t agree with the premise. It doesn’t make the hard parts harder, if you ACTUALLY spend half the time you’d have ORIGINALLY spent on the hard problem carefully building cont…

    > …I have experience AI’s deleting
    > things they shouldn’t but not since
    > like, the gpt4 days.…
One blogger posted this [1] only yesterday about what Anthropic's latest and greatest did…

———

…I pointed Opus 4.6 at a 60K line Go microservice I had vibe coded over the past few months, gave it some refactoring principles, and let it run unsupervised…

…

What went wrong #

At some point in the code, we re-fetch some database records immediately before doing a write to avoid updating from stale data. It decided those calls were unnecessary and _removed them_…

———

[1] https://g2ww.short.gy/ClaudesLaw

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#304

Post by causal »

koliber wrote: post #299

The article is gone, but going off the title here... If the easy stuff takes up 90% of the time, and the hard stuff 10%, then AI can be helpful. Personally, I can do "the easy stuff" with AI about 3-5x faster. So now I have a lot more free time for the hard stuff. I don't let the AI near the hard stuff as it often gets confused and I don't save much time. I might still use it as a thought partner, but don't give it a…

Helpful, absolutely, but only if you're solving the right problem. Solving the wrong problem with AI is doubly harmful because it will almost always give you something that runs, but now you are on a path that takes a lot of willpower to give up.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#305

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

At this point, I don’t even know what to make of blog posts like this.

The very first example of deleting 400+ lines from a test file. Sure, I've seen those types of mistakes from time-to-time but the vast majority of my experience is so far different from that, I don’t even know what to make of it.

I’m sure some people have that experience some of the time, but… that’s just not been my experience at all.

Source: Use AI across 7+ unrelated codebases daily for both personal and professional work.

No, it’s not a panacea, but we’re at the stage that when I find myself arguing with AI about whether a file existed; I’m usually wrong.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#306

Post by Andrex »

AuthAuth wrote: post #54
zjp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

I did have the thought that the SCOTUS ruling against Oracle slightly opened the door to code not being copyrightable (they deliberately tap-danced around the issue). Maybe that's the future: all code is plumbing; no art, no creative intent.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#309

Post by adithyassekhar »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #301
adithyassekhar wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tangent, I keep hearing this good base, but I've never seen one, not in the real world. No projects, unless it's only you working on it, only yourself as the client, and is so rigid in it's scope, it's frankly useless, will have this mythical base. Over time the needs change, there's no sticking to the plan. Often it's a change that requires rethinking a major part. What we loathe as tight coupling was just efficie…

> No projects, unless it's only you working on it, only yourself as the client, and is so rigid in it's scope, it's frankly useless, will have this mythical base. This is naive. I've been building an EMR in the healthcare space for 5 years now as part of an actual provider. We've incrementally released small chunks when they're ready. The codebase I've built is the most consistent codebase I've ever been a part of. I…

Lesson learned. Yes you are right. I am indeed a junior, I made that comment when I was tired honestly with a rushed project. There's no delete button, otherwise I'd have deleted it when I cooled off. Thank you for giving me hope that good code is still being made.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#310

Post by crazygringo »

nly wrote: post #221
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Five hours ago I was reviewing some failed tests in a PR. The affected code was probably 300 lines, total source for the project ~1200 lines. Reading the code, I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on... and I wrote all the code. Why would that be failing? This all looks totally fine. There that should fix it! Fuck. When you write code, your brain follows a logical series of steps to produce the code, based o…

Sounds like you were just reviewing bad code. The author should have provided context via comments and structured the code in a way that is easy to change and understand

Exactly. A long time ago, I learned to write comments explaining all necessary context for my future self and for others -- exactly for this reason.

Remember, you're not writing code just to execute. You're writing it to be read.

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