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The silent death of good code

amit.prasad.me

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Re: The silent death of good code

#51

Post by BobbyJo »

logicprog wrote: post #24

This feels very odd to me, because I'm actually able to refactor and DRY and generally improve my code and tests and documentation much more with agents to help speed up the process than I ever would have before. I also make sure to describe and break down problems when I ask an agent to implement them in such a way that they produce code that I think is elegant. It seems to me like people think there's only two sett…

There has always been a tension between "take the time to build something you know will work" and "prioritize speed over all else and hope you get lucky and it doesn't fall over too fast" in software. AI is making the difference in speed between the two schools of thought larger and larger, and it's almost certain to make the latter philosophy more financially attractive.

Re: The silent death of good code

#52

Post by somesortofthing »

I've found that Good Code is actually actively detrimental to agent performance. I suspect agent-written code is very comprehensible to agents(for example, agents love to define single-use variables because it lets them document the code without adding comments, having to read whole files, or understand novel code patterns(complex pipeline statements, for example) but is a nightmare to read. You have to keep the meanings of all the small variables in your head, so your short term memory gets overloaded with small pieces of info. I tried making the agent refactor to reduce these, but noticed a substantial increase in how often it misunderstands what the code does.

Re: The silent death of good code

#54

Post by charcircuit »

IhateAI_3 wrote: post #25
nemothekid wrote: post #6

This is something I've been thinking about as I start to adopt more agent-first coding. There is a real advantage to having good code especially when using agents. "Good Code" makes iteration faster, the agent is unlikely to make mistakes and will continue to produce extensible code that can easily be debugged (by both you and the agent). A couple months ago I refactored a module that had gotten unweildly, and I trie…

[flagged]

>Why would you adopt agent first coding?

Since most work on software projects is going to be done via coding, debugging, QA, etc AI agents you should prioritize finding ways to increase the velocity of these AI agents to maximize the velocity of the project.

>Are you that bad at it?

That is irrelevant.

>Is there anything you really have to get done regardless of quality right this second?

You are implying that AI agents have low quality work, but that is not the case. Being able to save time for an equivalent result is a good thing.

>Just write the code yourself, and stop training your replacement.

AI labs are the ones doing the training better AI.

Re: The silent death of good code

#55

Post by amitprasad »

ElatedOwl wrote: post #47
love2read wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

none of this even kind of addresses why the article implies that people stopped writing good code. why are we going to spend "a lot more reading code than before"? is this an ai generated comment?

The author effectively argues deep thinking is dead, that people are no longer going to take the time to understand the problem and solution space before they solve it. I think that’s untrue, I think it’s /more/ important than before. I think you’re going to have significantly more leverage with these tools if you’re capable of thinking. If you’re not, you’re just going to produce garbage extremely fast. The use of t…

Just because you or I may invest effort into deep-thinking, it does not mean that others will.

I'm not worried about this at Modal, but I am worried about this in the greater OSS community. How can I reasonably trust that the tools I'm using are built in a sound manner, when the barrier to producing good-looking bad code is so low

Re: The silent death of good code

#56

Post by love2read »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #26

IMO, you need to have the capacity to write Good Code to know what Good Enough Code is. It's highly contextual to a particular problem and season in a codebase's life. One example: ugly code that upholds an architecture that confers conceptual leverage on a problem. Most of the code can operate as if some gnarly problem is solved without having to grapple with it themselves. Think about the virtual memory subsystem o…

> IMO, you need to have the capacity to write Good Code to know what Good Enough Code is. I completely agree, and its one of the biggest problem of trying to talk about "how you use agents". A lot of the people that may use the same agents with the same workflow may see wildly different results depending on their ability to evaluate the end result.

> The problem with this argument is many do not believe this sort of leverage is possible outside of a select few domains, so we're sort of condemned to stay at a low level of abstraction.

I think theres a similar tangential problem to consider here: people don't think that they are the person to create the serious abstraction that saves every future developer X amount of time because its so easy to write the glue code every time. A world where every library or API was as well thought out as the virtual memory subsystem would be an overspecified but at the same time enable creations far beyond the ones seen today (imo).

> Even the SICP authors admitted programming had become more about experimentation and gluing together ready-made parts than building beautifully layered abstractions which enable programs to just fall out of easily.

Re: The silent death of good code

#58

Post by love2read »

somesortofthing wrote: post #52

I've found that Good Code is actually actively detrimental to agent performance. I suspect agent-written code is very comprehensible to agents(for example, agents love to define single-use variables because it lets them document the code without adding comments, having to read whole files, or understand novel code patterns(complex pipeline statements, for example) but is a nightmare to read. You have to keep the mean…

I think what you are finding is that people's definition of "Good Code" differs the same way two people's definition of "good food" differs.

Re: The silent death of good code

#59

Post by ChuckMcM »

I really reasonate with this post, I too appreciate "Good Code"(tm). In a discussion on another forum I had a person tell me that "Reading the code that coding agents produce is like reading the intermediate code that compilers produce, you don't do that because what you need to know is in the 'source.'"

I could certainly see the point they were trying to make, but pointed out that compilers produced code from abstract syntax trees, and the created abstract syntax trees by processing tokens that were defined by a grammar. Further, the same tokens in the same sequence would always produce the same abstract syntax tree. That is not the case with coding 'agents'. What they produce is, by definition, an approximation of a solution to the prompt as presented. I pointed out you could design a lot of things successfully just assuming that the value of 'pi' was 3. But when things had to fit together, they wouldn't.

We are entering a period where a phenomenal amount of machine code will be created that approximates the function desired. I happen to think it will be a time of many malfunctioning systems in interesting and sometimes dangerous ways.

Re: The silent death of good code

#60

Post by ryan_n »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #13

Good code was approximately never valued in enterprise. How many companies worth billions or even trillions have webpages that take 5+ seconds to load text, and use Electron for their desktop applications? In that regard, nothing has changed. There is still a market for good code in the world, however. The uses of software are nearly infinite, and while certain big-name software gets a free pass on being shitty due t…

> I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them?

I understand the sentiment here but it shouldn't be surprising that people are upset that their profession and livelihoods are being drastically changed due to advances in AI.

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