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I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

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Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#61

Post by mschild »

gizmo686 wrote: post #59
SrslyJosh wrote: post #5

> Reading through these commits sparked an idea: what if we treated prompts as the actual source code? Imagine version control systems where you commit the prompts used to generate features rather than the resulting implementation. Please god, no, never do this. For one thing, why would you not commit the generated source code when storage is essentially free? That seems insane for multiple reasons. > When models ine…

My work has involved a project that is almost entirely generated code for over a decade. Not AI generated, the actual work of the project is in creating the code generator. One of the things we learned very quickly was that having generated source code in the same repository as actual source code was not sustainable. The nature of reviewing changes is just too different between them. Another thing we learned very qui…

> One of the things we learned very quickly was that having generated source code in the same repository as actual source code was not sustainable.

Keeping a repository with the prompts, or other commands separate is fine, but not committing the generated code at all I find questionable at best.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#62

Post by dcre »

thorum wrote: post #23

Humorous that this article has a strong AI writing smell - the author should publish the prompts they used!

I don’t like to accuse, and the article is fine overall, but this stinks: “This transparency transforms git history from a record of changes into a record of intent, creating a new form of documentation that bridges human reasoning and machine implementation.”

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#63

Post by mellosouls »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #5

> Reading through these commits sparked an idea: what if we treated prompts as the actual source code? Imagine version control systems where you commit the prompts used to generate features rather than the resulting implementation. Please god, no, never do this. For one thing, why would you not commit the generated source code when storage is essentially free? That seems insane for multiple reasons. > When models ine…

Yes, it's too early to be doing that now, but if you see the move to AI-assisted code as at least the same magnitude of change as the move from assembly to high level languages, the argument makes more sense.

Nobody commits the compiled code; this is the direction we are moving in, high level source code is the new assembly.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#64

Post by [deleted] »

sitkack wrote: post #19
Dylan16807 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Models are improving every day. People are figuring out thousands of different optimizations to training and to hardware efficiency. The idea that right now in early June 2025 is when improvement stops beggars belief. We might be approaching a limit, but that's going to be a sigmoid curve, not a sudden halt in advancement.

It is copium that it will suddenly stop and the world they knew before will return. ChatGPT came out in Nov 2022. Attention Was All There Was in 2017, we were already 5 years in the past. Or 5 years of research to catch up to, and then from 2022 to now ... papers and research have been increasing exponentially. Even in if SOTA models were frozen, we still have years of research to apply and optimize in various ways.

[deleted]

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#65

Post by spaceman_2020 »

tptacek wrote: post #54
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument is that this stuff will so radically improve senior engineer productivity that the demand for junior engineers will crater. And without a pipeline of junior engineers, the junior-to-senior trajectory will radically atrophy Essentially, the field will get frozen where existing senior engineers will be able to utilize AI to outship traditional senior-junior teams, even as junior engineers fail to secure em…

I don't know why people don't give more credence to the argument that the exact opposite thing will happen.

If a junior engineer ships a similar repo to this with the help of AI, sure, I'll buy that.

But as of now, it's senior engineers who really know what they 're doing who can spot the errors in AI code.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#66

Post by tptacek »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #65
tptacek wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people don't give more credence to the argument that the exact opposite thing will happen.

If a junior engineer ships a similar repo to this with the help of AI, sure, I'll buy that. But as of now, it's senior engineers who really know what they 're doing who can spot the errors in AI code.

Hold on. You said "really know what they're doing". Yes, I agree with that. What I don't buy is the coupling of that concept with "seniority".

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#67

Post by fch42 »

dcre wrote: post #60
tptacek wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people don't give more credence to the argument that the exact opposite thing will happen.

Right. I don’t understand why everyone thinks this will make it impossible for junior devs to learn. The people I had around to answer my questions when I was learning knew a whole lot less than Claude and also had full time jobs doing something other than answering my questions.

It won't make it impossible for junior engineers to learn.

It will simply reduce the amount of opportunities to learn (and not just for juniors), by virtue of companies' beancounters concluding "two for one" (several juniors) doesn't return the same as "buy one get one free" (existing staff + AI license).

I dread the day we all "learn from AI". The social interaction part of learning is just as important as the content of it, really, especially when you're young; none of that comes across yet in the pure "1:1 interaction" with AI.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#69

Post by afiori »

stingraycharles wrote: post #37
fastball wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea as stated is a poor one, but a slight reshuffling and it seems promising: You generate code with LLMs. You write tests for this code, either using LLMs or on your own. You of course commit your actual code: it is required to actually run the program, after all. However you also save the entire prompt chain somewhere. Then (as stated in the article), when a much better model comes along, you re-run that chain…

Means the temperature should be set to 0 (which not every provider supports) so that the output becomes entirely deterministic. Right now with most models if you give the same input prompt twice it will give two different solutions.

Do LLMs inference engines have a way to seed their randomness? so tho have reproducible outputs with still some variance if desired?

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#70

Post by Xelbair »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #5

> Reading through these commits sparked an idea: what if we treated prompts as the actual source code? Imagine version control systems where you commit the prompts used to generate features rather than the resulting implementation. Please god, no, never do this. For one thing, why would you not commit the generated source code when storage is essentially free? That seems insane for multiple reasons. > When models ine…

Worse. Models aren't deterministic! They use temperature value to control randomness, just so they can escape local minima!

Regenerated code might behave differently, have different bugs(worst case), or not work at all(best case).

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