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I'm going back to writing code by hand

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Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#341

Post by hansmayer »

sevenzero wrote: post #313
hansmayer wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I typically avoid any most abstractions or third party dependencies Right, so depending on an LLM makes perfect sense in that case, thanks for clarifying :)

[flagged]

Mate, that's literally what you implied, innit? You probably "can" do it yourself, but you choose not to - I wonder why? Also the point of sarcasm is to communicate it in such way that it is obvious, without using the "/s" signifier. You know like, telling a joke at a party that you don't have to explain.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#342

Post by james_marks »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #309
herdcall wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no longer sure you have to, actually. I mean, we do trust the assembly that compilers produce without having to read it, don't we? We're rapidly getting to that stage with LLMs, IMO.

The assembly is a deterministic transform of the input logic, and if it doesn't match then it's a bug in the compiler. If an LLM-based code generator doesn't match what you asked for, that's OK, just pull the slot-machine handle again. that's the difference.

The "pull the slot-machine handle again" is the dangerous thing here.

I can feel it sometimes, as my brain shuts down and I gamble instead of thinking. It's a reversion to what I call "monkey mind" where you just keep pressing buttons to "make it work". I took a decade training my mind away from this, and too much AI is bringing it back.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#343

Post by RugnirViking »

mountainriver wrote: post #259
pron wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I'm talking about production software that needs to survive and evolve for a long while.

Can you not review it?

I think this misses the scale of the problem. Review never fixed tech debt, nor did it fix relevant/bloated test suites. It didn't solve complexity, or eliminate footguns. Very few people (I would argue almost noone) had developed theories for what all of these even were, or how to spot them in code.

Reviewers aren't perfect, far from it. And we just gave them ~20x more code to review. Incentives mean that taking 20x longer to review is unacceptable. So where do we go from here?

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#344

Post by leonaves »

pron wrote: post #192

Yep. The only people I've heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don't read it. The problem is that the mitigations offered in the article also don't work for long. When designing a system or a component we have ideas that form invariants. Sometimes the invariant is big, like a certain grand architecture, and sometimes it’s small, like the selection of a data structure. You can tell the agent what the…

What's the difference between asking an AI to write you a module you never read and installing a 3rd-party module without auditing all its source code?

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#345

Post by bayindirh »

herdcall wrote: post #306
raincole wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "people" in your hypothetical story have been wrong the whole time. The correct attitude is: When AI can complete lines, you still have to read and understand the code. When AI can complete whole functions, you still have to read and understand the code. When AI can complete features and tickets, you still have to read and understand the code.

I'm no longer sure you have to, actually. I mean, we do trust the assembly that compilers produce without having to read it, don't we? We're rapidly getting to that stage with LLMs, IMO.

> we do trust the assembly that compilers produce without having to read it

Yes, because wrong assembly blows really loudly. From wrong behavior to invalid instruction errors and everything between them. Moreover, compilers are battle tested over the years, with extremely detailed test suites, and extreme testing (everyday, hundreds of thousands users test and verify them).

Also, as people said, assembly generation is deterministic. For a given source file and set of flags, you get the same thing out. Byte by byte, bit by bit. This is what we call "reproducible builds".

AI is not like that. It's randomized on purpose, it pulls from training set which contains imperfect, non-ideal code. "Yeah, it works whatever", doesn't cut it when you pull a whole function out of its connections, formed by the training data. It can and will make errors, because it's randomized from a non-ideal pool.

Next, sometimes you need tight code. Fitting into caches, running at absolute performance limit of the processor or system you have. AI is not a good fit here. Sometimes you go so far that you optimize for the architecture at hand, and it works slower on newer systems, so you need to re-optimize that thing.

For anyone who reads and murmurs "but AI can optimize", yes, by calling specific optimization routines written by real talented people for some cases; by removing their name, licenses, and context around them. This is called plagiarism in its mildest form and will get you in hot water in academia, for example. Writing closed source software doesn't make you immune from cheating and doing unethical things.

Lastly, this still rings in my ears, and I understood it over and over as I worked with more high performance, correctness critical code:

I was taking an exam, there's this tracing question. I raise my head and ask my professor: "Why do I need to trace this? Compiler is made to do this for me". The answer was simple yet deep: "If you can't trace that code, the compiler can't trace it either".

As I said, I just said "huh" at the time, but the saying came back and when I understood it fully, it was like being shocked by a Tesla coil.

Get your sleep, eat your veggies and understand your code. That's the four essential things you need to do.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#346

Post by amw-zero »

herdcall wrote: post #306
raincole wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "people" in your hypothetical story have been wrong the whole time. The correct attitude is: When AI can complete lines, you still have to read and understand the code. When AI can complete whole functions, you still have to read and understand the code. When AI can complete features and tickets, you still have to read and understand the code.

I'm no longer sure you have to, actually. I mean, we do trust the assembly that compilers produce without having to read it, don't we? We're rapidly getting to that stage with LLMs, IMO.

This is a really, really, really bad comparison. I used to say the same thing. But the semantic distance between compiling a for loop to equivalent assembly instructions is much smaller than the distance between "I'd like a web application that can store and retrieve todo items." The space of the latter is practically infinite in what can be "compiled."

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#347

Post by [deleted] »

yakattak wrote: post #333
herdcall wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no longer sure you have to, actually. I mean, we do trust the assembly that compilers produce without having to read it, don't we? We're rapidly getting to that stage with LLMs, IMO.

I want to preface this with that I am all for agentic engineering. I am so tired of hearing about this false equivalency. Compilers are deterministic, their outputs are well understood and they’re transparent. LLMs are not.

[deleted]

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#348

Post by TremendousJudge »

Xunjin wrote: post #335
bigfishrunning wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assembly is a deterministic transform of the input logic, and if it doesn't match then it's a bug in the compiler. If an LLM-based code generator doesn't match what you asked for, that's OK, just pull the slot-machine handle again. that's the difference.

Thank you for this, people often miss the point, comparing apples with oranges.

If they were equivalent, people would be committing the prompts and not the code

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#349

Post by n48dotdev »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #309
herdcall wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no longer sure you have to, actually. I mean, we do trust the assembly that compilers produce without having to read it, don't we? We're rapidly getting to that stage with LLMs, IMO.

The assembly is a deterministic transform of the input logic, and if it doesn't match then it's a bug in the compiler. If an LLM-based code generator doesn't match what you asked for, that's OK, just pull the slot-machine handle again. that's the difference.

[dead]

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#350

Post by Zardoz84 »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #326
herdcall wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no longer sure you have to, actually. I mean, we do trust the assembly that compilers produce without having to read it, don't we? We're rapidly getting to that stage with LLMs, IMO.

I know it’s tiring to talk about “hallucination”, but truly, models still do hallucinate They constantly say they did a thing they didn’t, say they know how to solve something when they don’t, etc. Regardless of guard rails or tests - AI forces a constant vigilance of a new kind. Not just “what might have gone wrong” but also “what do I think is working but isn’t actually”. And we’re not even talking about how it cho…

"still" isn ghecorrect word. They always be having hallucinations
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