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

Write less code, be more responsible

blog.orhun.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 135 posts

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#61

Post by shevy-java »

> So you are saying that the quality of the projects is going down?

The website seems to at the least be semi-generated via AI. But I think the statement that the quality of many projects went downwards, is true.

I am not saying all projects became worse, per se, but if you, say, search for some project these days, often you land on a github page only. Or primarily. How is the documentation there? Usually there is README.md and some projects have useful documentation. But in most cases that I found, open source projects really have incredibly poor documentation for the most part. Documentation is not code, so the code could be great, but I am increasingly noticing that even if the code gets better, the documentation just gets worse; rarely updated, if at all. Even when you file requests for specific improvements, often there is no response or change, probably because the author just lacks time to do so, anyway.

But I am also seeing that the code also gets worse. AI generated slop is often unreadable and unmaintainable. I have even recently seen AI spam slop used on mailing lists - look here:

https://lists.ffmpeg.org/archives/list/ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.o...

Michael Niedermayer does not seem to understand why AI slop is a problem. One comment reveals that. I don't read mailing lists myself really (never was able to keep up with traffic) but I would be pissed to no ends if AI spam like that would land into my mailbox and waste my time. Yet the people who use AI spam, don't seem to understand mentally why that is a problem. This is interesting. They suddenly think spam is ok if AI generated it. So the overall trend is that quality goes down more and more. Not in all projects but in many of them.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#62

Post by lelanthran »

dpark wrote: post #58
lelanthran wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time > I used an LLM to research the code paths and ensure that my understanding of the break was correct and what the potential side effects of my proposed fix would be. Using the LLM for understanding is very different to using the LLM for codegen. You are not really disagreeing w…

My point is that these are not separate activities. They are drawing a false distinction between thinking and coding and then asserting that code speed doesn’t matter and implying that AI only helps with the coding bit. None of this is actually true, though. Coding and thinking are often tightly intertwined, as rarely is the coding piece so straightforward that it requires no interesting thought. Coding speed does ma…

> My point is that these are not separate activities. They are drawing a false distinction between thinking and coding

I agree.

> and implying that AI only helps with the coding bit.

They did imply that. Do you think that AI only helps with the coding bit, helps with the thinking bits, or helps with neither?

> Coding and thinking are often tightly intertwined, as rarely is the coding piece so straightforward that it requires no interesting thought.

I agree with this too.

> Coding speed does matter, even if it’s not the primary bottleneck for many things.

Up to a point, sure. But without AI, we read code once while writing it, we read it again while testing it/finding errors during tests, we read it again during review.

With AI code we read it during review. Maybe.

If AI generates code faster than the time it takes to read it more than once, then it isn't "helping" in terms of sustainability. Churning out code is easy; maintaining that code is not.

> And AI can be very helpful outside the context of pure coding.

Isn't this how the author is using it? Outside the context of pure coding? I admit this is how I use it - to understand some new thing that I have to implement before I implement it.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#63

Post by bdangubic »

agentultra wrote: post #20
bdangubic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The aphorism is a bit dated but rings true: you can’t add another developer and make the process go faster. It usually slows teams down. I've been doing this for 30-years and this is another political slogan of sorts. this is true in every single imaginable job - new people slow you down, until they do not and become part of the well-oiled machine that is hopefully your team. not sure why people insist on saying th…

If you’ve heard it a number of times and refuse to consider what people are saying then maybe I can’t help you. I’m talking from personal experience of well over twenty years as both a developer, and for a while, a manager. The slow part isn’t writing code. It’s shipping it. You can have every one vibe coding until their eyes bleed and you’ve drained their will to live. The slowest part will still be testing, verifyi…

> It’s shipping it. You can have every one vibe coding until their eyes bleed and you’ve drained their will to live. The slowest part will still be testing, verifying, releasing, and maintaining the ball of technical debt that’s been accumulating. You will still have to figure out what to ship, what to fix, what to rush out and what to hold out until it’s right, etc. The more people you have to slower that goes in my experience. AI tools don’t make that part faster.

This type of comments is all that is wrong with our industry. If "shipping it" is an issue there are a colossal failure throughout the entire organization. My team "shipped" 11 times yesterday, 7 on Monday, 21 on Friday... "shipping" is a non-event if you know what the F you are doing. If you don't, you should learn. If adding more people to help you with the amazing shit you are doing makes you slower, you have a lot of work to do up and down your ladder.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#64

Post by philipwhiuk »

> It's something ethical that I don't know the answer to. In my case, it was the guy's first ever open source project and he understandably went for the quickest way of creating an app. While I appreciate their contribution to open source, they should be responsible for the quality of what they put out there.

Pitching this is the exact opposite of the maintainer burden of expectation.

> Sometimes I discover a project that is truly wonderful but visibly vibe-coded. I start using it without the guarantee of next release not running rm -rf and wipe my system.

For me this is on you, not the developer.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#65

Post by bdangubic »

slopinthebag wrote: post #35
bdangubic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

another one, this is 2nd most frequent thing people write here, not sure how to even approach answering :) so I’ll do what I was thought in first grade to never do and answer a question with a question - how much time per week does a brick layer spend laying bricks? they are looking at these new “robots” laying bricks automatically and talking on BrickLayerNews “man, the brick laying has not been a bottleneck for a l…

I think you comparing software development to brick laying says all anyone needs to hear about your approach to software development. It's like saying the bottleneck in mathematics is arithmetic.

writing software, if you know what you are doing, is very similar to laying bricks. write smallest possible functions that do one thing and do it well and then compose them, like bricks, to make a house (which is what brick layers do).

comments like this come from places where it is more like bunch of chefs in a italian restaurant making spaghetti pasta (code) :)

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#66

Post by bdangubic »

slopinthebag wrote: post #34
bdangubic wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. I see this on HN just so much and I am not sure what this is, almost seems like a political slogan that followers keep repeating. I had to do some rough math in my head but in the last 5 years I have been involved with hiring roughly 40 SWEs. Every single one of them was hired because writing the code was THE bottleneck (the only o…

It sounds like you just aren't very good at managing teams of programmers tbh. If your bottleneck is producing code, very rarely does hiring more programmers actually help.

this makes just so much sense, I'll manage my programmers to work 37 hours per day, imma try this next week and will let you know how it goes

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#67

Post by tonyedgecombe »

vbezhenar wrote: post #46
20k wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time and if that goes away well… I dunno, that’s weird. I will understand it even less. This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its unde…

AI not just types code for you. It can assist with almost every part of software development. Design, bug hunting, code review, prototyping, testing.

It can even create a giant ball of mud ten times faster than you can.

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#68

Post by NilMostChill »

vbezhenar wrote: post #46
20k wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time and if that goes away well… I dunno, that’s weird. I will understand it even less. This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its unde…

AI not just types code for you. It can assist with almost every part of software development. Design, bug hunting, code review, prototyping, testing.

A Luddite farm worker can assist in all those things, the question is, can it assist in a useful manner?

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#69

Post by changyou »

agentultra wrote: post #2

I’m working as a single solo developer of a tiny video game. I’m writing it in C with raylib. No coding assistants, no agents, not even a language server. I only work on it for a few hours during the week. And it’s progressing at a reasonable pace that I’m happy with. I got cross-compilation from Linux to Windows going early on in a couple of hours. Wasn’t that hard. I’ve had to rework parts of the code as I’ve progr…

[dead]

Re: Write less code, be more responsible

#70

Post by rvz »

20k wrote: post #11
agentultra wrote: post #2

I’m working as a single solo developer of a tiny video game. I’m writing it in C with raylib. No coding assistants, no agents, not even a language server. I only work on it for a few hours during the week. And it’s progressing at a reasonable pace that I’m happy with. I got cross-compilation from Linux to Windows going early on in a couple of hours. Wasn’t that hard. I’ve had to rework parts of the code as I’ve progr…

>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time and if that goes away well… I dunno, that’s weird. I will understand it even less. This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its unde…

> This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI.

They want you to pay for their tokens at their casino and rack up a 5 - 6 figure bill.

Post reply on HN