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The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

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Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#61

Post by galbar »

danparsonson wrote: post #58

I seem to be in a minority but I find user stories or features to be really awkward and unnatural units of work for building software. Sure these things help to define the expected result but they shouldn't directly drive the development process. Imagine building a house that way - you don't build the living room, then the kitchen, then the bathroom etc.; you build floors, walls, the roof... The 'features' or use cas…

My take on this is that, from a SW development POV, user stories are not the right unit of work. Instead, I treat user stories as "Epics". Stake holders can track that Epic for progress, as the unit of work from their POV.

Internally, the team splits Epics into "Spikes" (figure out what to do) and "Tasks" (executing on the things we need to do).

- Spikes are scoped to up to 3 days and their outcome is usually a doc and either a follow-up Spike or Tasks to execute.

- Tasks must be as small and unambiguous as possible (within reason).

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#62

Post by klibertp »

pjc50 wrote: post #12
abtinf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

liszper: > most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today Also liszper: oh, you tried the current approach and don’t agree with me? Well you just don’t know what you are doing.

Funnily enough the same kind of approach you get from Lisp advocates and the more annoying faction of Linux advocacy (which isn't as prevalent these days, it seems)

> the same kind of approach you get from Lisp

In what way? Lisp (Common Lisp) is the most stable and unchanging language out there. If you learned it anytime after the late 80s, you still know it, and will know it until the end of time. Meanwhile, here, we hear that "a year ago" is so much time that everything changed (for the better, of course).

Or is it about needing some serious time investment to get comfortable with Lisp? Even then, once you do spend enough time that s-exprs stop being a problem, that's it; there's nothing else to be getting comfortable with, and certainly, you won't need to relearn any of that a year into the future.

I don't think AI coding and Lisp are comparable, even considering just the tone of messages on the topic (as far as I can see, "smug lisp weenies" are a thing of the ancient past).

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#63

Post by [deleted] »

liszper wrote: post #42
pjc50 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. what is this thing and can we see it?

you can OSINT me pretty easily, not going to post it here for the sake of anonymity against crawlers who train models on our conversations. today's HN comments are tomorrow's coding LLMs

[deleted]

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#64

Post by dgfitz »

liszper wrote: post #27
dgfitz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hacker culture never took root in the 'AI' gold rush because the LLM 'coders' saw themselves not as hackers and explorers, but as temporarily understaffed middle-managers." [0] This, this is you. This is the entire charade. It seems poetic somehow. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123094

I see myself as a hacker.

By your own exposition, you aren’t a hacker.

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#65

Post by gnarcoregrizz »

angusturner wrote: post #15
liszper wrote: post #3

most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today thanks for the article, it's a good one

I think most SWEs do have a good idea where I work. They know that its a significant, but not revolutionary improvement. If you supervise and manage your agents closely on well scoped (small) tasks they are pretty handy. If you need a prototype and don't care about code quality or maintenance, they are great. Anyone claiming 2x, 5x, 10x etc is absolutely kidding themselves for any non-trivial software.

I've found it to be insanely productive when doing framework-based web development (currently working with Django), I would say it's an easy 5-10x improvement in productivity there, but I still need to keep a somewhat close eye on it. It's not nearly as productive in my home grown stuff, it can be kind of annoying actually.

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#66

Post by igouy »

danparsonson wrote: post #58

I seem to be in a minority but I find user stories or features to be really awkward and unnatural units of work for building software. Sure these things help to define the expected result but they shouldn't directly drive the development process. Imagine building a house that way - you don't build the living room, then the kitchen, then the bathroom etc.; you build floors, walls, the roof... The 'features' or use cas…

Software is not like "building a house" and is not like a sculpture and is not like a cake because software is (mostly) notional not physical.

Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

#69

Post by walleeee »

kibwen wrote: post #17
liszper wrote: post #3

most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today thanks for the article, it's a good one

Last week I wanted to generate some test data for some unit tests for a certain function in a C codebase. It's an audio codec library, so I could have modified the function to dump its inputs to disk and then run the library on any audio file and then hardcoded the input into the unit tests. Instead, I decided I wanted to save a few bytes and wanted to look at generating dummy data dynamically. I wanted to try out Cl…

> Ironically, despite how they're sold, these tools are infinitely better at going from code to English than going the other way around.

Yes. Decently useful (and reasonably safe) to red team yourself with. But extremely easy to red queen yourself otherwise.

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