Comment by krtkush
1 day ago
I find the use of AI like quicksand.
The more I use it, the more I have to rely on it to make changes/ fix things in the same system. In the end, I come out feeling empty; no intuitive knowledge of the system "I" built or fixed.
Code review is important but it does not replace the mental model I am able to build when I do all the steps of software development manually without AI.
No worries, at some point your hit the wall with it and the reality will force you to look at the code. It won't be nice, but until that point delulu land is sustainable enough to fall forward
It's the uncanny valley of AI. It's still not quite good enough yet that you can trust it blindly on a big codebase, so you still have to read and understand everything - which is often harder than just writing it up yourself.
I doubt AI will be good enough to _scale_ many things because human language isn't sufficient to explain it (especially when not understanding what is being built). Humans invented more concise languages (math, C++) to pair with their intellectual acuity. [1]
In one extreme, we have art, which cannot be accurately reproduced or explained in any language (unless a concise language was used to create it, like math or CS art).
At the other end: 1 + 1 = 2 and PI = 3.14...
[1] It seems any language that has a binary outcome (correct/wrong) helps the AI tremendously, however when e.g. creating software, that software is not functioning in isolation. The software is an attempt to codify a fuzzy human system or need, and that information only flows in one direction: human to machine.
You don’t need to copy-paste the same comment in every reply. It seems like agenda pushing more than contributing.
Sorry, you’re right it’s bad behaviour and I’ll stop it.
But I’m not really pushing an agenda here. I use Claude a ton myself.
I put on AGENTS.MD a prompt that says: teach me something small something about the changes you did if the changes were < 3 tokens if it was more than that teach me more. That's helped me somwhat. So now everytime it changes something it teaches me something about the codebase
i literally tell it "explain it like a 5 year old can understand" and "keep it under 100 characters".. helps somewhat (its still an llm so caveat emptor)
I find that it helps a little to maintain an iron grip on the design. Take the time for really detailed change planning. Be pedantic and push back against every little thing that seems wrong or even a little odd in any plan document the LLM spews out. Likewise, watch for the for the moment when the LLM eventually stumbles and starts to make excuses for deviations from the plan. Interrupt immediately and force it back onto the plan (or your vision), potentially with pointers to resolve immediate problems. Completely unattended agents just don't work for important code.
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>The more I use it, the more I have to rely on it to make changes/ fix things in the same system. In the end, I come out feeling empty; no intuitive knowledge of the system "I" built or fixed.
Most of us build a system to deliver a product to make money. We don't feel empty for not knowing how the system works, since we don't really care: it's just a means to an end.
Yeah, well, some of us aren’t uninterested, cynical losers only in it for the money.
> Most of us build a system to deliver a product to make money
Shouldn’t it be to deliver a system that is sold as a product? And even then that product is sold to consumers to solve their problems. Not knowing how it works means you don’t know what solution you’re selling.
You can see that in a lot of product announcement where the focus is on what they’re building, but not on how it solves some problem. The consumer is absent from the design process.
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