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How I write software with LLMs

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Re: How I write software with LLMs

#511

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

sarchertech wrote: post #509
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn’t matter how long you’re letting it run. If you aren’t reviewing the output, you have no way of knowing when it changes untested behavior. You’re focused on the output , I’m focused on the behavior. Thats the difference. Just like when I delegate a task to either another developer or another company like the random Salesforce integration or even a third party API I need to integrate with.

Unfortunately you are not equipped to observe and test all or even most of the behavior of a non-trivial system. And if you attempt to treat every module in your system like it’s untrusted 3rd party code you’ll run into severe complexity and size limits. No one codes large systems like that because it’s not possible. There are always escape hatches and entanglements.

Actual a little company you might have heard of called Amazon does…

Jeff Bezos mandated it in 2002.

https://konghq.com/blog/enterprise/api-mandate

AWS S3 by itself is made up of 200+ micro services

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#512

Post by LogicFailsMe »

sarchertech wrote: post #500
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't have a LinkedIn profile, don't need one. But I'm guessing you're listed under LinkedIn Lunatics.

I read back through a few of your posts and you’re either schizophrenic, or a very elaborate troll. I know a few older people who started posting like this when they hit their 50s. I’ve only got a few years left. Hopefully I can avoid it, but maybe it’s inevitable.

Ageism: now that's a warrior's flex, amIRight?

People like myself in their 50s to 60s who had the experience of banging the metal on imperfect buggy hardware late into the night to mine gems before Python made the entire software engineering community pivot to a core competency of syntax pedanting plus stringing library calls together are having a real party with AI agents effectively doing the same thing they did 30 years ago. I personally never stopped coding even through my one awful experience as an engineering manager.

But you do you, and hear me now, dismiss me later. There won't be 45% unemployment because the minute AI starts replacing current engineering skills for real is the minute the people it targets wake up and start learning how to work with AI coding agents that will be dramatically better than today. People resist change until there are no other options, just look at fossil fuels. The free market will work that one out too eventually.

And no amount of some nontechnical guy vibe scienceing his way to a working mRNA vaccine for his cancer-ridden dog or an engineer unlocking mods to Disney Infinity just from the binary and Claude Code or an entire web browser ported to rust will ever convince you these things are not the enemy. And that's going to put you through some things down the road. So of course, since this will never happen I'm an elaborate troll or a nutcase just like the people who pulled all those things off, never mind all the evidence mounting that these things can be amazing in the right hands. That's CRAZYTALK! Stochastic Parrot! Glorified Autocomplete! Mad Max! Mad Max! DLSS 5!

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#513

Post by LogicFailsMe »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #490
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Started mine around the same time and yes, keeping up keeps one employed. What's disheartening however is how little keeping up the key decision makers and stakeholders at FAANNG do and it explains idiocy like already trying to fire engineers and replace them with AI. Hilarity ensued of course because hilarity always ensues for people like that, but hilarity and shenanigans appears to be inexhaustible resources.

I very much would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at BigTech again even knowing the trade off that I now at 51 make the same as 25 year old L5 I mentored when they were an intern and their first year back as an L4 before I left.

If you have FIRE money, getting off the hamster wheel of despair that is tech industry culture is the winning move. Well-played.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#514

Post by LogicFailsMe »

bhaak wrote: post #491
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're all quite intelligent. And they're world class experts in saving their own bacon. Doesn't mean they have any ethics though nor any emotional intelligence after decades of being surrounded by toadies and bootlickers.

Smart is not equal to intelligent. You can be very intelligent but have a blind eye on some trivial things. I’m certain that some of them think they are untouchable (or even just are well prepared). We will only see if that’s really true if shit hits the fan.

We all know they have bunkers and we roughly know where they are. I got suspended on reddit for threatening harm to others for saying that a couple weeks back. But I don't think we need to raid the bunkers in your TEOTWAWKI scenario, their bodyguards will do all the heavy-lifting once they realize the power balance has shifted. But I also don't expect a SHTF scenario, just a slow creeping enshitification of living standards instead of actually implementing a UBI.

And then the survivors who band together to rebuild community instead of chasing some idiotic Mad Max scenario will ultimately prevail. And yes, they are blind to that other option because they wouldn't end up on top.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#515

Post by staticassertion »

wiseowise wrote: post #503
staticassertion wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's well understood that programming interviews are a pretty shitty tool. They're a proxy for understanding if you have basic skills required to understand a computer. Notably, most companies don't rely on these alone, they have behavioral questions, architecture questions, etc. Have you ever done an interview at these companies you're talking about? They're 8 hours lol maybe 1 is spent programming. But it's just ve…

Gold luck passing Leetcode before you even get to all of these. Whether they’re shitty or not is irrelevant, they’re here and it’s a fact.

And what do you derive from that fact? The position is that coding is only one portion of the job. "But there's a coding interview" was used to rebut this position. I have pointed out that the coding interview is a fraction of the procses, once again indicating that the job involves much more than coding.

So you saying "but there's a coding interview" again... who cares? Why is that relevant?

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#516

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #513
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at BigTech again even knowing the trade off that I now at 51 make the same as 25 year old L5 I mentored when they were an intern and their first year back as an L4 before I left.

If you have FIRE money, getting off the hamster wheel of despair that is tech industry culture is the winning move. Well-played.

Not quite FIRE money. I still need to work for awhile - I just don’t need to chase money. I make “enough” to live comfortably, travel like I want (not first class.), save enough for retirement (max out 401K + catchup contributions + max out HSA + max out Roth).

We did choose to downsize and move to state tax free Florida.

If I have to retire before I’m 65, exit plan is to move to Costa Rica (where we are right now for 6 weeks)

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#517

Post by dkersten »

Ancapistani wrote: post #395
dkersten wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least the LLM will only take 5 minutes to tell you they don't know what to do. In my experience, the LLM will happily try the wrong thing over and over for hours. It rarely will say it doesn’t know.

Don’t ask it to make changes off the bat, then - ask it to make a plan. Then inspect the plan, change it if necessary, and go from there.

I do. I tend to follow a strict Research, Plan, Implement workflow. It does greatly help, but it doesn’t eliminate all problems.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#518

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

sarchertech wrote: post #510
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I somewhat agree. But that’s more about modularity. It helps when I can just have Claude code focus on one folder with its own Claude file where it describes the invariants - the inputs and outputs.

If you don’t read the code how the heck do you know anything about modularity? How do you know that Module A doesn’t import module B, run the function but then ignore it and implement the code itself? How do you even know it doesn’t import module C? Claude code regularly does all of these things. Claude code really really likes to reimplement the behavior in tests instead of actually exercising the code you told it t…

Well I know because my code is in separately deployed Lambdas that are either zip files uploaded to Lambda or Docker containers run on Lambda that only interact via APi Gateway, a lambda invoke, SNS -> SQS to Lambda, etc and my IAM roles are narrowly defined to only allow Lambda A to interact with just the Lambdas I tell it to.

And if Claude tried to use an AWS service in its code that I didn’t want it to use, it would have to also modify the IAM IAC.

In some cases the components are in completely separate repositories.

It’s the same type of hard separation I did when there were multiple teams at the company where I was the architect. It was mostly Docker/Fargate back then.

Having separately defined services with well defined interfaces does an amazing job at helping developers ramp up faster and it reduces the blast radius of changes. It’s the same with coding agents. Heck back then, even when micro services shared the same database I enforced a rule that each service had to use a database role that only had access to the tables it was responsible for.

I have been saying repeatedly I focus on the tests and architecture and I mentioned in another reply that I focus on public interface stability with well defined interaction points between what I build and the larger org - again just like I did at product companies.

There is also a reason the seven companies I went into before consulting (including GE when it was still a F10 company) I was almost always coming into new initiatives where I could build/lead the entire system from scratch or could separate out the implementation from the larger system with well defined inputs and outputs. It wasn’t always micro services. It might have been separate packages/namespaces with well defined interfaces.

Yeah my first job out of college was building data entry systems in C from scratch for a major client that was the basis of a new department for the company.

And it’s what Amazon internally does (not Lambda micro services) and has since Jeff Bezos’s “API Mandate” in 2002.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#519

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

sarchertech wrote: post #456
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You give way too much credit to the average mid level ticket taker. And again, why do I care how the code does it as long as it meets the functional and none functional requirements?

Because in a real application with real users all of the functional and non-functional requirements aren't documented anywhere but in the code.

If only a coding agent had access to your code…

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#520

Post by wiseowise »

staticassertion wrote: post #515
wiseowise wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold luck passing Leetcode before you even get to all of these. Whether they’re shitty or not is irrelevant, they’re here and it’s a fact.

And what do you derive from that fact? The position is that coding is only one portion of the job. "But there's a coding interview" was used to rebut this position. I have pointed out that the coding interview is a fraction of the procses, once again indicating that the job involves much more than coding. So you saying "but there's a coding interview" again... who cares? Why is that relevant?

Everybody who works for salary cares. You can lament how coding is just 1% of work, it’s irrelevant what percentage is “real” coding work when you can’t pass that coding round and you’re not hired.
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