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The highest quality codebase
331–340 of 409 posts
Re: The highest quality codebase
#332Claude 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…
> its quality of work is extremely high ...
It may seem decent until you look closer. Just like with a junior dev, you should always review the code very carefully, you can absolutely not trust it. It's not bad at trivial stuff, but fails almost always if things get more complex and unlike a junior dev, it does not tell you, when things get too complex for it.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#333Re: The highest quality codebase
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem solving is in figuring out what to prompt, which includes correctly defining the problem, identifying a potential solution, designing an architecture, decomposing it into smaller tasks, and so on Coding is just a formal specification, one that is suited to be automatically executed by a dumb machine. The nice trick is that the basic semantics units from a programming language are versatile enough to giv…
> Coding is just a formal specification If you really believe this, I'd never want to hire you. I mean, it's not wrong, it's just ... well, it's not even wrong.
I'd still hire them, in fact I see that level of understanding as a green flag.
Your response and depth of reasoning about why you wouldn't hire them is a red flag though. Not for a manager role and certainly not as an IC.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends what the problem is. Sometimes you can, sometimes you have to break the problem apart and get the LLM to do each bit separately, sometimes the LLM goes funny and you need to solve it yourself. Customers don't want you wasting money doing by hand what can be automated, nor do they want you ripping them off by blindly handing over unchecked LLM output when it can't be automated.
there are other ways: being scammed by lazy devs using AI to produce what devs normally do and not saving any money for the customer. i mentioned it in another thread, i heard first hand people say "i will never report how much time savings i get from gemini, at best i'll say 1 day a month"
If you produce the same product, then you get to ask for the same pay. That's not a scam.
If enough people can make the product faster, then competition will drive the price down. But the ability to charge less is not at all an obligation to charge less.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this different than testing the temperature?
It isn't, and it reflects how deeply LLMs are misunderstood, even by technical people
gpt-5* reasoning models do not have an adjustable temperature parameter. It seems like we may have a different understanding of these models.
And, like the other commenter said, the temperature may change the distribution of the next token, but the reasoning tends to reel those things in, which is why reasoning models are notoriously poor at creative writing.
You are free to run these experiments for yourself. Perhaps, with your deeper understanding, you'll shed new light on this behavior.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The impact is that now, if you want to modify the project in some way, you will need to learn Go. That's tautologically true, yes, but your claim was > Either you know the problem domain and can argue about which solution is better and why. Or you don't and what you're doing are experiment to learn the domain. So, assuming the domain of infrastructure-at-code is mostly known now which is a fair statement -- which i…
Neither. Because the solution for IaC is not Go or Rust, just like the solution for composing music is not a piano or a violin. A solution may be Terraform, another is Ansible,… To implement that solution, you need a programming language, but by then you’re solving accidental complexity, not the essential one attached to the domain. You may be solving, implementation speed, hiring costs, code safety,… but you’re not…
> Neither.
> A solution may be Terraform
They're asking about what language you use to write Terraform.
It's not accidental complexity, it's what the question is about.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The impact is that now, if you want to modify the project in some way, you will need to learn Go. That's tautologically true, yes, but your claim was > Either you know the problem domain and can argue about which solution is better and why. Or you don't and what you're doing are experiment to learn the domain. So, assuming the domain of infrastructure-at-code is mostly known now which is a fair statement -- which i…
> So, assuming the domain of infrastructure-as-code is mostly known now which is a fair statement -- which is a better choice, Go or Rust, and why? Remember, this is objective fact, not art, so no personal preferences are allowed. I think it’s possible to engage with questions like these head on and try to find an answer. The problem is that if you want the answer to be close to accurate , you might need both a lot o…
> It’s not impossible, just impractical with a high likelihood of being wrong due to bad or insufficient data or interpretation.
If it's impractical to know, why is using personal preference and intuition a "huge red flag"?
That's the core idea being disagreed with, not the idea that you could theoretically with enough resources get an objective answer.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#339One 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…
You mean literally assign a grade, like B+? This is unlikely to work based on how token prediction & temperature works. You're going to get a probability distribution in the end that is reflective of the model runtime parameters, not the intelligence of the model.
the gpt-5 reasoning models do not have a configurable temperature.
There's a reason why reasoning models are bad for creative writing. The thinking constrains the output.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note I'm not saying one is better than the other, but my takes: 1. The problem solving is in figuring out what to prompt, which includes correctly defining the problem, identifying a potential solution, designing an architecture, decomposing it into smaller tasks, and so on. Giving it a generic prompt like "build a fitness tracker" will result in a fully working product but it will be bland as it would be the average…
Honestly, I fundamentally disagree with this. Figuring out "what to prompt" is not problem-solving in a true sense imo. And if you're really going too deep into the problem domain, what is the point of having the code abstracted? My comment was based on you saying you don't care about the code and only what it does. But now you're saying you care about the code and review everything so I'm not sure what to make out o…
> Figuring out "what to prompt" is not problem-solving in a true sense
This just sounds like "no true scotsman" to me. You have a problem and a toolkit. If you successfully solve the problem, and the solution is good enough, then you are a problem solver by any definition worth a damn.
The magic and the satisfaction of good prompting is getting to that "good enough", especially architecturally. But when you get good at it - boy, you can code rings around other people or even entire teams. Tell me how that wouldn't be satisfying!