651–660 of 809 posts
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That's the point. Your prototype doesn't need to be pretty. It just needs to prove that the value is there for it to be made pretty.
Order of operations: Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast.[0] [0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. Fortunately SWEs have the architect path, which frequently rewards having lots of deep intuition even as the details of calculation continue to change. So one question that's urgent but unknowable until we get there is.. are we going to get good architects if they don't come…
A software architect who doesn't actually code is worse than useless imo, because they drag actual developers down, forcing them to implement their Powerpoint apps. I say that having worked in the architecture group at one of largest companies in the world. "I don't care if the app is a synchronous multi-page form with zero no need for websockets. It must have them!" (because it says so on my slide)
Sounds exactly like the kind of intuition an LLM will have.. "best practice" that's really whatever fads/marketing hype that there is a lot of noise about, never been informed by experiments or pain.
There was a post complaining about AI preference for god objects earlier, but the thing about stuff like that is, you could mechanically disincentivize it purely from complexity metrics or ASTs, either in training, or at the agentic layer later. I'm really much more worried about when LLMs are flooding the internet with marketing, and LLMs are consuming the marketing to determine best practice
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Write a damn good automated review agent that runs against their PRs before even looking at them… works well for me!
I've tried this without much luck. In my experience they get too bogged down on surface things and don't have the necessary business requirements/context to understand and find actual bugs. How have you set yours up that works well for you?
Take the bad result that you're getting, and pretend it's coming from an enthusiastic junior. What would you tell them to make them do this task better? Add that explanation to the agent (or explain that to the LLM and get it to add that to the agent, I have found this to work as well).
When you create a task for the LLM, get it to create a requirements document that lists all the requirements. Feed that into the review agent so it understands what the code agent was trying to do.
The LLM will do what you tell it to do. It doesn't magically understand what you want it to do. You have to tell it what to do.
Was it ever a lifetime career? Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers. Ageism is real in this industry. You either save up enough money to retire early, switch into management, or get forced out of the industry eventually. AI is just accelerating the trend. I see very few junior engineers resisting AI. I see a LOT of staff+ e…
Managers are being slammed - FB, Amazon and recently Cloudflare and Coinbase. New grads are being slammed, "because LLMs can do that work." No new folks, no managers, and no olds. What a delightful career we've chosen for ourselves.
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AI is pretty good at figuring out what the right thing to do is.
AI is decent at solving problems that lots of people already solved a long time ago.
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These days nobody bangs their heads over typos. LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair" when you have an error and googling it isn't helping, or googling it made you realize you have to read 30min of documentation. Coding is a joy now. LLMs shaved off all the rough edges.
Languages have been reporting compile and runtime errors for decades. Additionally very few senior developers don't already have their minds wired to spot typos the way copy editors spot bad punctuation. Typos were only really a problem for students.
I'm repeating what others have essentially said, but ask yourself what's on your resume. If it says "Software Engineer" and that's all it talks about, then yea you might not find it's a lifetime career. But if it's a diversity of things (that use or leverage software development) then you probably have a lifetime career ahead of you. I've been writing software for over 40 years but I've never seen myself as having a…
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These days nobody bangs their heads over typos. LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair" when you have an error and googling it isn't helping, or googling it made you realize you have to read 30min of documentation. Coding is a joy now. LLMs shaved off all the rough edges.
LLMs create typos in the code they create all the time. Claude 4.7. Maybe you are using some next-gen super-AI nobody else has? Or you're just lucky.