861–870 of 958 posts
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I'm struggling to imagine the sort of person who struggles with predictable glue code that I would trust with anything more important than that, with or without AI...
It's not a struggle for me to walk 15 miles to work every day, I could easily do it. It's just makes no sense when I have a car.
Repeat after me: most software spends the majority of its lifetime in the maintenance phase. Repeat after me: it follows that most of the money the software makes occurs during the maintenance phase. Repeat after me: our industry still does not understand this after almost 100 years of being in existence. Alan Kay was 100% right when he said that the computer revolution hasn't occurred yet. For all of our current adv…
Most software has a few years lifetime and nearly no users. What you say is only true after reaching a certain milestone like product market fit. I think the idea is to reach that turning point as fast as possible and then rebuild the system from ground up with maintainability and quality focus.
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Can AI make developers lazy in new ways? Of course! Why wouldn’t it? I don’t write things in ASM because I can be “lazy” and write 50x more useful instructions with a few lines of a modern language. I doubt I’d be able to write working ASM anymore without a serious refresher. Did newer languages erase my memory of ASM and make me “lazy”, or did my efforts evolve to make use of the newest technology regardless of “los…
> You wouldn't trust an engineer a bridge that an engineer vibe-engineered would you? If it was as easy to stress test/battery test/materials test/etc a bridge as it is to test code - then yes. I'd trust an engineer who vibe-engineered a bridge. --- The problem with mapping digital problems into meat-space is that there is inherently a few orders of magnitude of cost automatically added to anything that happens in me…
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AI is just revealing the two types of people in this line of work. Those who don’t actually like software and just do it because it’s lucrative, and the actual nerds who care.
I care a lot about software and I use LLMs extensively. There are some things I deeply understand yet I don't care for doing anymore because I've done them for years and there's nothing to be gained from doing them manually.
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I think there's some ambiguity in the discussion around what people mean when they say "good code". Good code for a business is robust code, that's functionally correct, efficient where it needs to be and does not cost too much. I believe most developers who care about good code are trying to articulate this, they care about a strong system that delivers well, which comes from good architecture. LLMs actually deliver…
But the trick is that if / when you can define "good code" in a deterministic manner, then the LLM can also deliver "good code". But if it's just based on feels, then of course it can't do it because it's not a mind reading machine.
I think all coding will become vibe coding, but it will be no less an engineering discipline. Note: I still review pretty much every line of code that I own, regardless of who generates it, and I see the problems with agents very clearly... but I can also see the trends. My take: Instead of crafting code, engineering will shift to crafting bespoke, comprehensive validation mechanisms for the results of the agents' wo…
It is very obviously hallucinogenic when it comes to new programming languages, new domains, and uncommon/poorly documented contexts. And AI is very poor at (3D) spatial visualization (making AI assisted CAD development incredibly hard).
AI is not capable of genuine logical thinking from fundamentals yet; these are highly trained, curated models.
What an excellent article by a smart, humble, still-learning person! Favorite quote:" There are a whole bunch of reasons I’m not scared that my career as a software engineer is over now that computers can write their own code, partly because these things are amplifiers of existing experience. If you know what you’re doing, you can run so much faster with them. [...] I’m constantly reminded as I work with these tools…
it’s sad that i had to triple-read this to determine you weren’t being sarcastic. sad for whom? i don’t know. but the amplifier take is exactly the right one.
Nevertheless, it is refreshing to see nuanced positive energy. I agree that AI is going to be the great multiplier.
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> The first thing I do with new agent driven project is set up quality checks. Linters, test frameworks, static analysis, etc I do this too, but then I sit and observe how agent gets very creative by going around all of these layers just to get to the finish line faster. Say, for example, if I needlessly pass a mutable reference and the linter screams at me, I know it's either linter is wrong in this case, or I shoul…
> Same story with tests. Who decides when it's the test that should be changed/deleted or the implementation? Claude is remarkably good at figuring this is out. I asked it to look at a failing test in a large and messy Python codebase. It found the root cause and then asked whether the failure was either a regression or an insufficiently specified test, performed its own investigation, and found that the test harness…
But I never have "fix this test" as a task. What happens when you task it with a feature implementation and test breaks in the middle of the session? It will not behave the same way.
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I agree with you on everything you said here except: > when you know how the thing works and have that mental context, you will always be faster than an AI That's just plain false, honestly. No one can type at the speed AI can code, even factoring in the time you need to spend to properly write out the spec & design rules the AI needs to follow when implementing your app/feature/whatever. And that gap will only incre…
> No one can type at the speed AI can code Don't we already have a weekly post nowadays explaining, again, that typing isn't the bottleneck?