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The highest quality codebase

gricha.dev

71–80 of 409 posts

Re: The highest quality codebase

#71
post #4

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

Just as enterprise software is proof positive of no intelligence under the hood.

I don't mean the code producers, I mean the enterprise itself is not intelligent yet it (the enterprise) is described as developing the software. And it behaves exactly like this, right down to deeply enjoying inflicting bad development/software metrics (aka BD/SM) on itself, inevitably resulting in:

https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

Re: The highest quality codebase

#72
post #64
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My last job was a mix of Ruby, Python, Bash, SQL, and Javascript (and CSS and HTML). One or two jobs before that it was all those plus a smattering of C. A few jobs before that it was C# and Perl.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#73
It can be difficult to explain to management why in certain scenarios AI can seem to work coding miracles, but this still doesn’t mean it’s going always speed up development 10x especially for an established code base.

Tangible examples like this seem like a useful way to show some of the limitations.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

Soon you'll realize you're the "AI". We've lost control.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#76
post #43

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…

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…

I really hope you don't actually treat junior devs this way...

Re: The highest quality codebase

#77
post #59

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…

How do you end up with 3 to 4 languages in one project?

Re: The highest quality codebase

#78
post #43

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…

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…

> 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 so tired of this analogy. Have the people who say this never worked with a junior dev before? If you treat your junior devs as brainless code monkeys who only exist to type out your brilliant senior developer designs and architectures instead of, you know, human beings capable of solving problems, 1) you're wasting your time, because a less experienced dev is still capable of solving problems independently, 2) the juniors working under you will hate it because they get no autonomy, and 3) the juniors working under you will stay junior because they have no opportunity to learn--which means you've failed at one of your most important tasks as a senior developer, which is mentorship.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#79

lol 5000 tests. Agentic code tools have a significant bias to add versus remove/condense. This leads to a lot of bloat and orphaned code. Definitely something that still needs to be solved for by agentic tools.

> Agentic code tools have a significant bias to add versus remove/condense.

Your point stands uncontested by me, but I just wanted to mention that humans have that bias too.

Random link (has the Nature study link): https://blog.benchsci.com/this-newly-proven-human-bias-cause...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_bias

Re: The highest quality codebase

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 AppK…

Love that you are disagreeing with parent by saying you built software all on your own, and you only had 20 years software experience.

Isn't that the point they are making?

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