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Automating myself out of development

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Re: Automating myself out of development

#61

Post by duggan »

general1465 wrote: post #23

I am completely calm regarding AI and development. First nobody sane want to give their domain IP to OpenAI/Anthropic. That's why local AI will eventually prevail and flourish because people who actually have some IP will have no problem to buy 10k+ EUR machine to run some pretty good models on it. However if your main job is just doing CRUD stuff, then you are screwed. Secondly hallucination is really Achilles heel…

> First nobody sane want to give their domain IP to OpenAI/Anthropic. That's why local AI will eventually prevail and flourish because people who actually have some IP will have no problem to buy 10k+ EUR machine to run some pretty good models on it. However if your main job is just doing CRUD stuff, then you are screwed

Replace OpenAI/Anthropic with AWS and this is not too dissimilar to the arguments in 2009 about cloud providers.

It’s not that there's nobody for whom this is true, it’s just that there’s enough of everyone else to build an empire with.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#62

Post by girvo »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

I wish people would describe in more detail the tasks they use LLMs to code. My experience is that simple components in an existing architecture are fine, but anything requiring architectural considerations quickly becomes a mess. On my projects (e.g. a ui framework), running multiple agents in parallel would just increase the speed at which it can stuff up the project.

I'm currently using it to do a large migration from one Relay environment to another, but this is possible because

1. We've done it by hand for another route already, which the LLM uses as reference

2. Theres a strong validation setup/harness I've setup for it with storybooks, and component tests

3. It's a _mostly_ mechanical transform. Not entirely, as the two environments/APIs are not 1:1, but it's close enough

But! I and my team are still reviewing everything shrug it is "faster" because I get to have this running while I'm in meetings planning other more interesting projects

And this isn't really that many agents in parallel. Yeah, plenty of fan-out subagents, but that IMO doesn't count/isn't really the same as what others are talking about

Re: Automating myself out of development

#63

Post by girvo »

philbo wrote: post #27
gnunicorn wrote: post #16

Interestingly, despite it being much more detailed and a lot more process and procedure than what I currently do - which is more akin to the version 0 described, but in parallel - we come up at the same final problem: reviews and quality assurance. I sign off the code I merged, part of company policy but also just to be sure it is actually decent. But reviewing has become the real draining bottleneck: even stacked PR…

For decades, engineers understood that large code reviews are harder than small ones. Out of both politeness and a desire to receive better code reviews, we learned to break our large changes into smaller chunks. Some engineers took things even further and replaced code reviews with pair programming. But then LLMs showed up and everyone seems to have forgotten those lessons. They can be still be applied now using cod…

> They can be still be applied now using coding agents, if you're willing to push back against the default setup and change your mode of thinking a little bit. Of course it doesn't help that an entire industry is dedicated to persuading us that maximizing token spend is the only way to get shit done.

Yeah the problem is the executives and managers around us are demanding we ship massive features as quickly as possible, and I like having a job and dread having to find a new one in this market...

Re: Automating myself out of development

#65

Post by uuuuunnnuuu »

yieldcrv wrote: post #32
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these people saying UI/UX is dead, then I see their designs and they're absolutely the worst (but they're always swearing by how incredible it is). Sorry access to an LLM (even if it could center a div reliably and make a responsive designs, it can't) does not give you taste, intuition or make you good at building user interfaces. You people/sloppers have no idea the amount of sweat that gets poured into great UX…

I’ve seen that slop but Claude Design has barely been out for a month And it’s fulfilled my needs better than v0, lovable, playwright via LLM or just iterating in the coding LLM. I’ve worked with graphic designers my whole career and have also contracted design agencies to do style guides and collaborate on branding and layouts. I’ve gotten the output that I’m looking for with Claude Design eventually you’ll see exam…

[dead]

Re: Automating myself out of development

#66

Post by mattmanser »

girvo wrote: post #62
noelwelsh wrote: post #2

I wish people would describe in more detail the tasks they use LLMs to code. My experience is that simple components in an existing architecture are fine, but anything requiring architectural considerations quickly becomes a mess. On my projects (e.g. a ui framework), running multiple agents in parallel would just increase the speed at which it can stuff up the project.

I'm currently using it to do a large migration from one Relay environment to another, but this is possible because 1. We've done it by hand for another route already, which the LLM uses as reference 2. Theres a strong validation setup/harness I've setup for it with storybooks, and component tests 3. It's a _mostly_ mechanical transform. Not entirely, as the two environments/APIs are not 1:1, but it's close enough But…

I think a problem here is you're overestimating how hard it is to rewrite something when you have one example of how to do it right. Even in the 2000s, I remember a junior essentially rewriting our entire codebase from old school asp vbscript to .Net in a few months. A 100 or so pages back then.

Your team could have done it pre-AI, but you just thought it was hard so you didn't try.

I remember migrating a code base from MySQL to SQL Server in the 2010s. I thought it would take me weeks, if not months. It took me a couple of days.

Immediately made me sour on the "hot" idea in the 2010s that your data layer should be provider agnostic so you could switch if you needed to. That was never a real thing, it was a made up justification for unnecessary over-engineering, by people who had clearly never tried to port an app from one data source to another. There are other reasons for a clear separation, but switching a few hundred SQL statements is not it.

In reality, mechanical ports are not that hard, you can sit down, put some music on and blitz it in a few days. Programmers just over-estimate how hard they will be.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#67

Post by oblio »

girvo wrote: post #63
philbo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For decades, engineers understood that large code reviews are harder than small ones. Out of both politeness and a desire to receive better code reviews, we learned to break our large changes into smaller chunks. Some engineers took things even further and replaced code reviews with pair programming. But then LLMs showed up and everyone seems to have forgotten those lessons. They can be still be applied now using cod…

> They can be still be applied now using coding agents, if you're willing to push back against the default setup and change your mode of thinking a little bit. Of course it doesn't help that an entire industry is dedicated to persuading us that maximizing token spend is the only way to get shit done. Yeah the problem is the executives and managers around us are demanding we ship massive features as quickly as possibl…

Give them some time to be slapped with the real AI invoices once Anthropic, OpenAI IPO.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#68

Post by LtWorf »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

I wish people would describe in more detail the tasks they use LLMs to code. My experience is that simple components in an existing architecture are fine, but anything requiring architectural considerations quickly becomes a mess. On my projects (e.g. a ui framework), running multiple agents in parallel would just increase the speed at which it can stuff up the project.

Architectural considerations are easy. Figuring out what to actually do from the super vague requirements is even worse I think.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#69

Post by zem »

zem wrote: post #59
noelwelsh wrote: post #2

I wish people would describe in more detail the tasks they use LLMs to code. My experience is that simple components in an existing architecture are fine, but anything requiring architectural considerations quickly becomes a mess. On my projects (e.g. a ui framework), running multiple agents in parallel would just increase the speed at which it can stuff up the project.

i've been running claude in what the blog calls phase 0 for the last 6-7 months. i'm perfectly happy with it, my development velocity has increased while i still have a good grasp of the entire app, and i've actually been making decent progress with web development for a personal project, which is something i've bounced off several times in the past. also i do not get stuck as often on stuff like "how do i get django…

i just ran into a concrete example of why i would not want to run a tree of unsupervised agents churning out code. i have a project that generates large but repetitive .docx documents. i asked claude to add some graphics to it, it did a very good job of figuring out the xml graphics elements, locating where in the document structure it could insert them, and even printing to pdf and checking visually to get them perfectly lined up with the text. it took some 5 minutes, i would likely have spent an hour doing all that from scratch including several trips to google.

then i looked at the code and asked it to benchmark, hinting that it looked like it was doing a lot in the inner loop. and sure enough, adding a few simple graphics to every page more doubled the time it took to generate the largest size of document (~1s -> ~2.2s for ~400 pages). without any more prompting claude figured out that it had an accidentally-quadratic loop, and fixed that.

i then had to tell it "look, we are using a template to avoid regenerating boilerplate with every page. you can add a placeholder to the template and replace it with graphics using xml patching code you already wrote for another part of the doc generation". the final code was a lot cleaner and ran in ~1.2s, which claude (again unprompted, to its credit) did fine-grained benchmarking to prove was the unavoidable overhead of simply inserting all those large chunks of xml into the document.

i wouldn't even say it was a coincidence that i ran into this right after writing my comment about having to micromanage the LLM, because this sort of thing happens all the time. i can say that i had a much easier time doing this because i looked at the code generated in a single commit and could easily see that it smelt off. i would have not have wanted to do this at the end of 20 commits all building on each other.

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