Comment by flir
1 day ago
Our current architectures are complex, mostly because of DRY and a natural human tendency to abstract things. But that's a decision, not a fundamental property of code. At core, most web stuff is "take it out of the database, put it on the screen. Accept it from the user, put it in the database."
If everything was written PHP3 style (add_item.php, delete_item.php, etc), with minimal includes, a chatbot might be rather good at managing that single page.
I'm saying code architected to take advantage of human skills, and code architected to take advantage of chatbot skills might be very different.
This is IMHO where the interesting direction will be. How do we architecture code so that it is optimized around chatbot development? In the past areas of separation were determined by api stability, deployment concerns, or even just internal team politics. In the future a rep might be separated from a monolith repo to be an area of responsibility that a chatbot can reason about, and not get lost in the complexity.
IMHO we should always architect code to take advantage of human skills.
1°) When there is an issue to debug and fix in a not-so-big codebase, LLMs can give ideas to diagnose, but are pretty bad at fixing. Where your god will be when you have a critical bug in production ?
2°) Code is meant for humans in the first place, not machines. Bytecodes and binary formats are meant for machines, these are not human-readable.
As a SWE, I pass more time reading than writing code, and I want to navigate in a the codebase in the most easy possible way. I don't want my life to be miserable or more complicated because the code is architected to take advantage of chatbot skills.
And still IMHO, if you need to architect your code for not-humans, there is a defect in the design. Why force yourself to write code that is not meant to be maintained by a human when you will in any case maintain that said code ?
This human quite likes having everything on one page, to be honest. And not having a leaky ORM layer between me and the SQL.
long time ago, in one small company, i wrote an accounting system from 1st principles and then it was deployed to some large-ish client. It took several months of rearranging their whole workflows and quarelling with their operators to enable the machine to do what it is good at and to disable all the human-related quirky +optimizations -cover-asses. Like, humans are good at rough guessing but bad at remembering/repeating same thing. Hence usual manual accounting workflows are heavily optimized for error-avoidability.
Seems same thing here.. another kind of bitter lesson, maybe less bitter :/