Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 699 posts

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#451

Post by gardenhedge »

0x500x79 wrote: post #111
dfxm12 wrote: post #6

there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers—or open source maintainers—and expects the “code review” process to handle the rest. Is anyone else seeing this in their orgs? I'm not...

I am currently going through this with someone in our organization. Unfortunately, this person is vibe coding completely, and even the PR process is painful: * The coding agent reverts previously applied feedback * Coding agent not following standards throughout the code base * Coding agent re-inventing solutions that already exist * PR feedback is being responded to with agent output * 50k line PRs that required a 1…

Just reject the PR?

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#452

Post by vernrVingingIt »

switchbak wrote: post #382
vernrVingingIt wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You all really believe PhDs and principle hardware engineers at Samsung, nVidia, etc have not worked around any abstract problem you all can come up with? We need a layer of abstraction not endless layers. Nothing says unearned wisdom than script kiddies who intentionally had money thrown at them to reinforce belief their mastery of RoR CRUD app dev is genius beyond all comprehension. Zomg you know Linux admin? Here'…

The way you make such broad assumptions and jump right into highly charged politics with nary a connection really does make me wonder about your emotional well being.

You don't see the connection because you weren't invited to participate in numerous discussions where these connections are made explicitly via detailed analysis.

I have more to do than refresh HN all day, going for brevity here.

Your expectation others must explicitly connect all the dots for you makes me question your grasp of reality. Most people alive are going about their lives unconcerned with your existence altogether.

"Highly charged politics". Relative emotional opinion.

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#453

Post by 9rx »

layer8 wrote: post #138

I’d go further and say while testing is necessary, it is not sufficient. You have to understand the code and convince yourself that it is logically correct under all relevant circumstances, by reasoning over the code. Testing only “proves” correctness for the specific state, environment, configuration, and inputs the code was tested with. In practice that only tests a tiny portion of possible circumstances, and omits…

Testing is not perfect, but what else is there? Even formal proofs are just another expression of testing. With greater mathematical guarantees than other expressions, granted, but still testing all the same; prone to all the very same human problems testing is burdened with.

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#454

Post by vcarrico »

> the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers—or open source maintainers—and expects the “code review” process to handle the rest.

I'm noticing something else very similar but involving not necessarily junior roles with long messages, when they use these AI writing assistants that resume stuff, creates follow-ups, etc. Putting this additional burden in whoever needs to read it. It makes me think of a quote that says: "I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time."

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#455

Post by gardenhedge »

davey48016 wrote: post #68
dfxm12 wrote: post #6

there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers—or open source maintainers—and expects the “code review” process to handle the rest. Is anyone else seeing this in their orgs? I'm not...

A friend of mine has a junior engineer who does this and then responds to questions like "Why did you do X?" with "I didn't, Claude did, I don't know why".

Some other comments suggest immediately firing.. but a junior engineer needs to be mentored. It should be explained to them clearly that they need to understand the changes they have made. They should also be pointed towards the coding standards and SDLC documentation. If they refuse to change their ways, then firing makes sense.

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#456

Post by theshrike79 »

tech-ninja wrote: post #305
trevor-e wrote: post #159

> Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work. Strong disagree here, your job is to deliver solutions that help the business solve a problem. In _most_ cases that means delivering code that you should be able to confidently prove satisfies the requirements like the OP mentioned, but I think this is an important nitpick distinction I didn't understand until later on in my career.

> In _most_ cases that means delivering code that you should be able to confidently prove satisfies the requirements like the OP mentioned That is an insane distinction that you are trying to do there. In which cases delivering code that doesn't satisfy the requirements would solve a business problem?

Not all problems are "work" vs "doesn't work".

We're not talking about making a calculator that can't calculate 1+1. This might be a website that's a bit slow and janky to use.

25% of users go away because it's shit, but 75% stay. And it would've too much effort to push the jank to zero and retain a 100%.

A website that takes juuuust too long to load still "satisfies requirements" in most cases, especially when making loading instant carries a significant extra cost the customer isn't willing to pay for.

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#457

Post by theshrike79 »

roryirvine wrote: post #272
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets interesting when a company assigns 2 story points to a task that requires 6 minimum. No time for writing tests, barely any time to perform code reviews and QA. Also, next year the company tells you since we have AI now, all tickets must be done 2 times quicker. Who popped this balloon? I know I need to change my employer, but it's not so easy. And I'm not sure another employer is going to be any better.

Are you not involved in doing the estimation?

Me: "Boss, this takes at least 4 weeks to complete properly including QA time."

Boss: sucks in air through his teeth "Best I can do is one week. Get to it."

Me, with a massive mortgage and the job market is shit: "Rogerroger, bossman"

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#458

Post by wiml »

skydhash wrote: post #103
phito wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often write PR descriptions, in which I write a short explanation and try to anticipate some comments I might get. Well, every time I do, I will still get those exact comments because nobody bothers reading the description. Not to say you shouldn't write descriptions, I will keep doing it because it's my job. But a lot of people just don't care enough or are too distracted to read them.

I just point people to the description. no need to type things twice.

"I think I covered that in the (PR text | comment two lines up | commit message), did you have an issue I didn't address there?"

Maybe that's the AI agent I would actually use, auto-fill those responses...

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#459

Post by CodeMage »

SoftTalker wrote: post #439
lokar wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the terminal level, whatever the title (they are just words) need to be the point at which you can handle moderately complex (multi-week) tasks with no supervision. And honestly, this will depend on the environment and kind of work being done.

If that's what you're looking for you can find it in academia. Universities have no problem paying people to stay around forever without promotion. Of course the pay won't be great, but the benefits are decent, PTO is usually excellent, and the work environment usually very low stress.

FWIW, I'm starting to seriously consider this as a strategy that will allow me to get to retirement without completely messing up my health due to stress and burnout.

That said, there's something deeply wrong with our industry if that's the way we expect things to work. I never felt that teaching was my calling, but I might end up being forced into it anyway and taking up a job that someone with proper passion and vocation could fill. Why? Because my own industry doesn't understand that unlimited growth is not sustainable.

For that matter, "growth" is not the right word, either. We're all being told that scaling the ladder is the same thing as growing and developing, but it's not.

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#460

Post by xendo »

roeles wrote: post #384
layer8 wrote: post #138

I’d go further and say while testing is necessary, it is not sufficient. You have to understand the code and convince yourself that it is logically correct under all relevant circumstances, by reasoning over the code. Testing only “proves” correctness for the specific state, environment, configuration, and inputs the code was tested with. In practice that only tests a tiny portion of possible circumstances, and omits…

Since we can't really formally prove most code, I think property based testing such as with hypothesis[1] would make sense. I have not used it yet, but am about to for stuff that really needs to work. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45818562

We can't really property test most code. So it comes down, as with everything, to good judgement and experience.
Post reply on HN