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The highest quality codebase

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Re: The highest quality codebase

#381

Post by RHSeeger »

skydhash wrote: post #313
keeda wrote: post #300

Earlier 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…

> 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…

> I truly believe that everyone that says that typing is a chore once they've got the shape of a solution get frustrated by the amount of bad assumptions they've made.

To a lot of people (clearly not yourself included), the most interesting part of software development is the problem solving part; the puzzle. Once you know _how_ to solve the puzzle, it's not all that interesting actually doing it.

That being said, you may be using the word "shape" in a much more vague sense than I am. When I know the shape of the solution, I know pretty much everything it takes to actually implement it. That also means I've very bad at generating LOEs because I need to dig into the code and try things out, to know what works... before I can be sure I have a viable solution plan.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#382

Post by adastra22 »

postalcoder wrote: post #339
adastra22 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn’t matter if it is configurable. It is still there in the inference algorithm.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#383

Post by tayo42 »

wosat wrote: post #229
tayo42 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call html, yaml or css languages. Same for sql, do you really context switch between sql and other code that frequently? Everyone should stop using bash, especially if you have a scripting language you can use already.

Sorry for being pedantic, but what does the "L" stand for in HTML, YAML, SQL? They may not be "programming languages" or, in the case of SQL, a "general purpose programming language", but they are indeed languages.

You don't have to apologize. It's the internet, pedantic is expected

Re: The highest quality codebase

#384

Post by rvz »

> ...oh and the app still works, there's no new features, and just a few new bugs.

Many apps out there with developers religiously worshipping high quality and over-engineering over a single app with less than 10 users or if they are lucky enough to get over 1,000 users.

…and all of that and not a single dollar was made. Might as well donated it to Anthropic.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#385

Post by skydhash »

RHSeeger wrote: post #381
skydhash wrote: post #313

Earlier 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…

> I truly believe that everyone that says that typing is a chore once they've got the shape of a solution get frustrated by the amount of bad assumptions they've made. To a lot of people (clearly not yourself included), the most interesting part of software development is the problem solving part; the puzzle. Once you know _how_ to solve the puzzle, it's not all that interesting actually doing it. That being said, yo…

I understand your point. But what you should be saying is that you have an idea of the correct solution. But the only correct solution is code or a formal proof that it is in fact correct. It’s all wishes and dreams otherwise. If not, we wouldn’t have all of those buffer overflow, one by off errors, and xss vulnerabilities.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#386

Post by RHSeeger »

skydhash wrote: post #385
RHSeeger wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I truly believe that everyone that says that typing is a chore once they've got the shape of a solution get frustrated by the amount of bad assumptions they've made. To a lot of people (clearly not yourself included), the most interesting part of software development is the problem solving part; the puzzle. Once you know _how_ to solve the puzzle, it's not all that interesting actually doing it. That being said, yo…

I understand your point. But what you should be saying is that you have an idea of the correct solution. But the only correct solution is code or a formal proof that it is in fact correct. It’s all wishes and dreams otherwise. If not, we wouldn’t have all of those buffer overflow, one by off errors, and xss vulnerabilities.

All we _ever_ have is an idea of the correct solution. There's no point at which we can ever say "this is the correct solution", at least not for any moderately sized software problem.

That being said, we can say

- Given the implementation options we've found, this solution/direction is what we think is the best

- We have enough information now that it is unlikely anything we find out is going to change the solution

- We know enough about the solution that it is extremely unlikely that there are any more real "problems/puzzles" to be solved

At that point, we can consider the solution "found" and actually implementing it is no more a part of solving it. Could the implemented solution wind up having to deal with an off-by-one error that we need to fix? Sure... but that's not "puzzle solving". And, for a lot of people, it's just not the interesting part.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#387

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

airstrike wrote: post #211
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how to interpret someone saying they don't follow DRY. Do you meant taking it to the Zealous extreme, or do you abhor helper functions? Is this a "No True Scottsman" thing?

I just think DRY is overblown. I just let code grow. When parts of it become obvious to abstract, I refactor them into something self contained. I learned this from an ice wizard. When I was younger, writing Python rather than Rust, I used to go out of my way to make everything DRY, DRY, DRY everywhere from the outset. Class-based views in Django come to mind. Today, I just write code, and after it's working I go bac…

I can agree with that - honestly a constant focus on DRY seems overly zealous to me. I only start DRYing if I see a need.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#388

Post by mjr00 »

Philpax wrote: post #327
mjr00 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never worked with junior devs as incompetent as you describe, having worked at AWS, Splunk/Cisco, among others. At AWS even interns essentially got assigned a full project for their term and were just told to go build it. Does your company just have an absurdly low hiring bar for juniors? > Giving juniors full autonomy is a great way to end up with an unmaintainable mess that is a nightmare to work with withou…

Your experience is the outlier, not the norm. Most people don't work for AWS.

Sure but I've worked for other places too, not just AWS. Including small startups and mid-sized companies.

All of them had bad juniors--and bad seniors--who people quickly learned could not be trusted with anything and were either fired or put into a situation where they could do minimal damage.

However none of them had blanket expectations of "juniors are too stupid to figure out how to solve problems and need step-by-step instructions." I'm sure some places like that exist, but I'd never want to work there; after all, if the place I'm working for openly admits it hires idiots, what does that say about me?

Re: The highest quality codebase

#389

Post by just6979 »

'In some iterations, coding agent put on a hat of security engineer. For instance - it created a hasMinimalEntropy function meant to "detect obviously fake keys with low character variety". I don't know why.'

Yes, you do know why. Because somewhere in its training, that functionality was linked to "quality" or "improvement". Remember what these things do at their core: really good auto-complete.

'The prompt, in all its versions, always focuses on us improving the codebase quality. It was disappointing to see how that metric is perceived by AI agent.'

Really? It's disappointing to see how that metric is perceived by humans, and the AIs are trained on things humans made. If people can't agree on "codebase quality", especially the ones who write loudly about it on the intetnet, it's going to be impossible for AI agents to agree. A better prompt actually specifying what _you_ consider to be improvements would have been so much better: perhaps minimize 3rd party deps, or minimize local utils reimplementing existing 3rd party libs, or add quality typechecks.

'The leading principle was to define a few vanity metrics and push for "more is better".'

Yeah, because this is probably the most common thing it saw in training. Programmers actually making codebase quality improvements are just quietly doing it, while the ones shouting on the internet (hence into the training data) about how their [bad] techniques [appear to] improve quality are also the ones picking vanity metrics and pushing for "more is better".

'I've prompted Claude Code to failure here'

Not really a failure: it did exactly what you asked: impoved "codebase quality" according to its training data. If you _required_ a human engineer to do the same thing 200 times, you'd get similar results as they run out of real improvements and start scouring the web for anything that anybody ever considered an "improvement", which very definitely includes vanity metrics and "more is better" regarding test count and coverage. You just showed that these AIs aren't much more than their training data. It's not actually thinking about quality, it's just barfing up things it has seen called "codebase quality improvements", regardless of the actual quality of those improvements.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#390

Post by KronisLV »

> In message log, the agent often boasts about the number of tests added, or that code coverage (ugh) is over some arbitrary percentage. We end up with an absolute moloch of unmaintainable code in the name of quality. But hey, the number is going up.

Oh hey, just like real developers!

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