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Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

codingwithjesse.com

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Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#391

Post by tracker1 »

I kind of resemble the Rockstar portion mentioned... that said, I'm a massive fan and prominently defend KISS/YAGNI over most other principals... Not the there are never abstractions, but IMO, abstractions should make the rest of development easier and not just hide the common points of use/access behind painful boilerplate or interfaces.

I know of several projects I've worked on that are alive well over a decade later, and some of which I've heard feedback on even recently. Very little of it excessively negative.

It's been an uphill battle though, especially having worked in a lot of C#/.Net shops, where Enterprise Patterns are often adopted when not necessary or prudent. There's also a balance between new tooling and what's working/known already.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#392

Post by tracker1 »

nrmitchi wrote: post #157

> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…

I'm not sure that I completely agree... my longest lived apps are the ones that were built with a KISS to the extreme mindset... make it as simple as possible and easy to replace as can be. Then it just lives forever.

My issues with using agents is actually kind of similar... pushing for simpler solutions over excess complexity... I want an image zoom control, and the AI goes down a rabbit hole of complex math, JS and CSS... Why not just wrap in a div with overflow properties set and scale the actual image size? (then it does that and uses 1/10th the code, and surprise it actually works).

The more I use AI, the more I hear about overspend and rework, the more I'm absolutely convinced that the right way to use AI in coding is as a gatekeeper... babysit it, review what it does and steer it in the right direction.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#393

Post by [deleted] »

LearnYouALisp wrote: post #390
dang wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not ok to post slurs to HN and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Has nothing to do with that. If someone is looking for something, they can find it anywhere. If you want to say "prevalent in [place name]... etc" The emphasis is on the tech culture. The factors are multiple. Parallel: Do you know about chauvinism, etc.?

[deleted]

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#394

Post by jorvi »

nrmitchi wrote: post #157

> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…

What really sucks about mass production is that it inevitably kills the middle tier of craftsmanship, whilst doing nothing to offer something of similar quality.

So before, you had 3-5 levels or craftsmanship to choose from, with an exponential cost increase. Now you either get to choose the dirt-cheap mass-produced stuff, the middle tier mass-produced stuff (still relative cheap), or like you stated, you're gonna have to drop $1000 on a pair of leather shoes. Full hockeystick-graph.

And sometimes the craftsmen just disappear. These days for example, it is hideously difficult to find high quality linnen.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#395

Post by tegiddrone »

kaydub wrote: post #170
bogwog wrote: post #119

I realized recently that this all has an unsavory element of ego to it. It doesn't help that LLMs have basically been trained to talk like they're performing in a movie, getting creative with techno-babble that sounds both plausible and exciting. I recently had to review some slop where the LLM was using terms like "event storm" to describe how some callbacks work, or "gating-solve" to describe a simple change to an…

Funny, the element of ego I'm seeing are the devs that can't accept that LLMs write perfectly good code at a faster pace. It's always "slop" this or "vibe coded" that. Meanwhile I've personally shipped multiple apps and professionally we've done HUGE things in these past 6 months using LLM tools.

Sounds like the aforementioned rockstar dev may have found their way to comment and miss the point.

When I was less self aware, I'd say similar things: my coworkers/manager can't accept that I write perfectly good code at a faster pace. Doesn't matter whether it's good or bad code-- the coworkers have to collectively understand it in order for it to be maintainable.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#396

Post by Capricorn2481 »

freediddy wrote: post #385
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should probably know better than to interact with a 3 month account called "freediddy", but here we go. > Then you add an agent that goes through the code and simplifies it Can you? I just asked Opus to generate a sum function. def sum(a, b): return a + b Then I asked if it could simplify it further. I would expect it to say this is simple enough, or just use the actual `sum` function, but it did this. add = lambda…

> If you ask it to simplify something, it will make changes whether it needs to or not. This is false. You can prompt it to only make changes that will have a material effect on the performance. You can create performance tests and have it run the test after every change and if nothing changes then back it out. You're not thinking creatively enough about how to use AI to your advantage.

> You can prompt it to only make changes that will have a material effect on the performance

Nobody was talking about performance. There's too much handwaving in your comment to really go further.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#397

Post by abahgat »

Jensson wrote: post #332
beezlewax wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly think an ikea desk has "more expert craftsmanship" than a hand crafted by a woodworker desk?

Don't you think IKEA has expert engineers designing their furniture that will sell millions? Programming is the equivalent to designing a factory, not carving out wood pieces.

Some programming is the equivalent to designing a factory, some programming is the equivalent to carving out wood pieces.

I've worked in large organizations where a small number of staff+ engineers were approaching programming as factory, while many more engineers were obsessing about the details of their own narrowly-focused work and liked it that way.

It feels like the scale is tipping more towards the factory model and, understandably, not everyone is excited about that.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#398

Post by gyanchawdhary »

dang wrote: post #388
LearnYouALisp wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's not ok to post slurs to HN and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Agreed. There's no place for racist slurs on HN, especially when they're posted from behind anonymous usernames. It's often the kind of thing people wouldn't dare say under their real name if their livelihood depended on it ;)

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#400

Post by ben_w »

ryandrake wrote: post #172
conductr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine walking through life and everything is clear, obvious, easy to process and having to watch humanity make stupid choices over and over and over again when the answers have been long known... I don’t claim to be book smart or have a high IQ or whatever but I feel this way about small things that I feel are common sense. It’s maddening to me to watch people fumble around. Or do X when obviously it will result…

One of the things I try to teach my kid is: You are going to have to deal with the fact that there are deeply stupid people all around you, without it affecting your mental health. Those stupid people might be in a position of power over you, they might be other kids in school (or coworkers, later), they might be the president of the country, they might be your neighbor, or they might just be obstacles on the road on…

A lesson which I wish I had learned as a kid; I had examples to work from, but nobody taught me how to deal correctly. To cope and accept without it eating me up.

I'm still not sure how to deal with people being not only wrong but either too dumb or too arrogant to change how wrong they are. (Which is of course me being wrong and unable to change…)

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