Decent sentiment and analogy, but writing this with AI with hackneyed examples undercuts the point
I actually found the examples to be both on theme and reflective of "If history doesn't repeat, it certainly echoes".
The AI Great Leap Forward
61–70 of 76 posts
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#62Liked the article in general, but > These apps will win awards at the next all-hands. In two years they’ll be unmaintainable tech debt some poor soul inherits and rewrites from scratch. Huge assumption/prediction that I think is actually just wrong. There's this weird assumption from a certain crowd, never justified or explained, that tech debt accrued by AI is now, and will forever be, impossible for AI to address,…
I agree with this. If anything there will be less tech debt, because it's easier than ever to clean up. Unit and end-to-end tests are free now. Telling an agent to go through your code base and find bugs is free now. Telling an agent to generate all possible user interaction to your API and then performance test it is free now. Everything is so easy and takes much less time than it used to.
> Unit and end-to-end tests are free now.
Not free because agents have a big tendency towards useless tests, so you need to verify them and make sure they're testing real things and the things that matter. I'll agree that it's a lot easier to generate thorough tests matching a spec, though.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you have an AI refactor AI generated code? What am I missing here, if AI is the cause of the tech debt because it doesn't write great code, won't you just end up with more tech debt if you ask AI to refactor it?
If a human produces tech debt, do you think a human can't refactor? Most of the time a human works over code multiple times, and still produces tech debt. Give an AI agent enough time, by prompting it multiple times, and explicit instructions to look for and address tech debt of various forms, and it will.
A human has taste. They learn over time from codebase patterns and develop a sense of when an abstraction can be reused, improved or refactored. Agents often generate repeated code because the original file wasn't added to the context, and it's up to a human reviewer to recognise this.
In my experience, an agent will rarely recognise a common pattern and lift it into a new abstraction. It requires a human with taste and experience to do it. For example, an agent will happily add a big amount if branches in different places of the codebase where a strategy pattern or enum would be better (depending on the language).
If you have a working prompt or harness that ameliorates this, I'd be glad to see it.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#64Liked the article in general, but > These apps will win awards at the next all-hands. In two years they’ll be unmaintainable tech debt some poor soul inherits and rewrites from scratch. Huge assumption/prediction that I think is actually just wrong. There's this weird assumption from a certain crowd, never justified or explained, that tech debt accrued by AI is now, and will forever be, impossible for AI to address,…
I have some recent experience with this, and it's quite quantifiable. I helped two people with no UI experience get their AI generated project deployed.
It probably won't pass a security review (It rather curiously generated a document.write call in a React project to print a component). I had to disable a number of accessibility related lint checks to get the code committed, as it didn't pass them. It has no tests.
The effort to meet the company's stated standards is genuinely likely to be greater than creating the thing.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#65What’s the story with Klarna? Any details around it?
They got rid of many employees replacing it with A.I thinking it would benefit the company. Now they’ve had multiple security issues, are under investor scrutiny and can’t rely on a robot to get them out of real world predicaments.
don’t be fooled, they lie and deceive too. Klarna who? Investor fraud its what they do. #shutdown
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#66What’s the story with Klarna? Any details around it?
They got rid of many employees replacing it with A.I thinking it would benefit the company. Now they’ve had multiple security issues, are under investor scrutiny and can’t rely on a robot to get them out of real world predicaments. don’t be fooled, they lie and deceive too. Klarna who? Investor fraud its what they do. #shutdown
Yeah, people being able to access accounts via recycled phone numbers is not good (this wasn’t their first time either lol and they’ve been fined for similar stuff before by Swedish regulators)
Then the KYC bypass allowing fraud rings to buy 20k worth of products with stolen identities is outrages.
Then the IPO stuff… That entire thing is a mess and there’s so many issues with their F-1A and being dishonest.
Though this is just my subjective opinion and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can organise the code well once, template that and put guardrails in place for it to follow the structure you and the team have agreed is good. The engineering task becomes building the system that is capable of building the system to a high standard.
It will usually just keep on adding workarounds for workarounds. Tech debt increases.
Skill issue. We don't have that problem. The opposite is true. Every time the harness does something we're not happy with we figure out how to engineer out that failure mode. Tech debt decreases.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#68The outputs were wrong 2 years ago maybe.
Try multithreaded code, it's wild (how wrong it is). I wonder how/where next models will learn thread safety.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will usually just keep on adding workarounds for workarounds. Tech debt increases.
Avoiding this with Opus has been trivial in my experience.
Even with Sonnet or "lower" models like Kimi is trivial. The only thing I still find with AI-generated code is some degree of overengineering.
Re: The AI Great Leap Forward
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
They got rid of many employees replacing it with A.I thinking it would benefit the company. Now they’ve had multiple security issues, are under investor scrutiny and can’t rely on a robot to get them out of real world predicaments. don’t be fooled, they lie and deceive too. Klarna who? Investor fraud its what they do. #shutdown
Yeah, people being able to access accounts via recycled phone numbers is not good (this wasn’t their first time either lol and they’ve been fined for similar stuff before by Swedish regulators) Then the KYC bypass allowing fraud rings to buy 20k worth of products with stolen identities is outrages. Then the IPO stuff… That entire thing is a mess and there’s so many issues with their F-1A and being dishonest. Though t…
The AI isn't a breakthrough; it's a distraction from the fact that the company's security and finances are a mess.
It’s quite funny to now see Klarna offloading their security issues onto other companies (Google) while simultaneously suing them for $8 billion (PriceRunner v.s Google).