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

The highest quality codebase

gricha.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 409 posts

Re: The highest quality codebase

#61

Post by iambateman »

The point he’s making - that LLM’s aren’t ready for broadly unsupervised software development - is well made.

It still requires an exhausting amount of thought and energy to make the LLM go in the direction I want, which is to say in a direction which considers the code which is outside the current context window.

I suspect that we will not solve the context window problem for a long time. But we will see a tremendous growth in “on demand tooling” for things which do fit into a context window and for which we can let the AI “do whatever it wants.”

For me, my work product needs to conform to existing design standards and I can’t figure out how to get Claude to not just wire up its own button styles.

But it’s remarkable how—despite all of the nonsense—these tools remain an irreplaceable part of my work life.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#62

Post by _cenw »

xnorswap wrote: post #18

Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems. "Hey claude, I get this error message: ", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could. "Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest. It suggested enthusiastically a library for and it was all " Recommended " about it, but when I pointed out that the…

This is it. It doesn't replace the higher level knowledge part very well.

I asked Claude to fix a pet peeve of mine, spawning a second process inside an existing Wine session (pretty hard if you use umu, since it runs in a user namespace). I asked Claude to write me a python server to spawn another process to pass through a file handler "in Proton", and it proceeded a long loop of trying to find a way to launch into an existing wine session from Linux with tons of environment variables that didn't exist.

Then I specified "server to run in Wine using Windows Python" and it got more things right. Except it tried to use named pipes for IPC. Which, surprise surprise, doesn't work to talk to the Linux piece. Only after I specified "local TCP socket" it started to go right. Had I written all those technical constraints and made the design decisions in the first message it'd have been a one-hit success.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#63

Post by giancarlostoro »

xnorswap wrote: post #18

Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems. "Hey claude, I get this error message: ", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could. "Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest. It suggested enthusiastically a library for and it was all " Recommended " about it, but when I pointed out that the…

> "Hey claude, I get this error message: ", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could.

This is true, as for "Open Ended" I use Beads with Claude code, I ask it to identify things based on criteria (even if its open ended) then I ask it to make tasks, then when its done I ask it to research and ask clarifying questions for those tasks. This works really well.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#64

Post by n4r9 »

pdntspa wrote: post #59
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm weird but I enjoy "actually writing the code."

Me writing code is me spending 3/4 of my time wading through documentation and google searches. It's absolutely hell on my ADD. My ability to memorize is absolutely garbage. Throughout my career I've worked in like 10 different languages, and in any given project I'm usually working in at least 3 or 4. There's a lot of "now what is a map operation in this stupid fucking language called again?!" Claude writing code ge…

May be a domain issue? If you're largely coding within a JS framework (which most software devs are tbf) then that makes total sense. If you're working in something like fintech or games, perhaps less so.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#65

Post by hombre_fatal »

thewebguyd wrote: post #41
james_marks wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a key part of the AI love/hate flame war. Very easy to write it off when it spins out on the open-ended problems, without seeing just how effective it can be once you zoom in. Of course, zooming in that far gives back some of the promised gains. Edit: typo

> without seeing just how effective it can be once you zoom in. The love/hate flame war continues because the LLM companies aren't selling you on this. The hype is all about "this tech will enable non-experts to do things they couldn't do before" not "this tech will help already existing experts with their specific niche," hence the disconnect between the sales hype and reality. If OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. wer…

The amount of GUIs I've vibe-coded works against your claim.

As we speak, my macOS menubar has an iStat Menus replacement, a Wispr Flow replacement (global hotkey for speech-to-text), and a logs visualizer for the `blocky` dns filtering program -- all of which I built without reading code aside from where I was curious.

It was so vibe-coded that there was no reason to use SwiftUI nor set them up in Xcode -- just AppKit Swift files compiled into macOS apps when I nix rebuild.

The only effort it required was the energy to QA the LLM's progress and tell it where to improve, maybe click and drag a screenshot into claude code chat if I'm feeling excessive.

Where do my 20 years of software dev experience fit into this except beyond imparting my aesthetic preferences?

In fact, insisting that you write code yourself is becoming a liability in an interesting way: you're going to make trade-offs for DX that the LLM doesn't have to make, like when you use Python or Electron when the LLM can bypass those abstractions that only exist for human brains.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#66

Post by nosianu »

xixixao wrote: post #11
m101 wrote: post #4

This is a great example of there being no intelligence under the hood.

Would a human perform very differently? A human who must obey orders (like maybe they are paid to follow the prompt). With some "magnitude of work" enforced at each step. I'm not sure there's much to learn here, besides it's kinda fun, since no real human was forced to suffer through this exercise on the implementor side.

> Would a human perform very differently?

How useful is the comparison with the worst human results? Which are often due to process rather than the people involved.

You can improve processes and teach the humans. The junior will become a senior, in time. If the processes and the company are bad, what's the point of using such a context to compare human and AI outputs? The context is too random and unpredictable. Even if you find out AI or some humans are better in such a bad context, what of it? The priority would be to improve the process first for best gains.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#67

Post by nyadesu »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #55
pdntspa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the…

Maybe I'm weird but I enjoy "actually writing the code."

In my case, I enjoy writing code too, but it's helpful to have an assistant I can ask to handle small tasks so I can focus on a specific part that requires attention to detail

Re: The highest quality codebase

#68

Post by xnorswap »

fudged71 wrote: post #42
xnorswap wrote: post #18

Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems. "Hey claude, I get this error message: ", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could. "Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest. It suggested enthusiastically a library for and it was all " Recommended " about it, but when I pointed out that the…

This tells me that we need to build 1000 more linters of all kinds

Unironically I agree.

One under-discussed lever that senior / principal engineers can pull is the ability to write linters & analyzers that will stop junior engineers ( or LLMs ) from doing something stupid that's specific to your domain.

Let's say you don't want people to make async calls while owning a particular global resource, it only takes a few minutes to write an analyzer that will prevent anyone from doing so.

Avoid hours of back-and-forth over code review by encoding your preferences and taste into your build pipeline and stop it at source.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#69

Post by bulletsvshumans »

I think the prompt is a major source of the issue. "We need to improve the quality of this codebase" implicitly indicates that there is something wrong with the codebase. I would be curious to see if it would reach a point of convergence with a prompt that allowed for it. Something like "Improve the quality of this codebase, or tell me that it is already in an optimal state."

Re: The highest quality codebase

#70

Post by loloquwowndueo »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #55
pdntspa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the…

Maybe I'm weird but I enjoy "actually writing the code."

“I want my AI to do laundry and dishes so I can code, not for my AI to code so I can do laundry and dishes”
Post reply on HN