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Comment by 01100011

19 hours ago

FWIW, our codebase is growing, and the size of each change is also growing, but it's because AI is making us fix all the bugs we'd previously check in because our code long ago surpassed what even our best developers can reason about.

The funny thing is that the AI adopters are in the middle of the bell curve. Our worst devs continue to perform worse than AI yet refuse to use it and our best devs continue to insist AI sucks despite it finding issues in their code and the reviews and designs they've approved.

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t-writescode  19 hours ago

Shouldn’t you be, in general, separating out new functionality from old fixes?

Shouldn’t those “fixing bugs we gained in the past” be their own MR that can be read, reasoned about and have evaluated test coverage?

  • 01100011  18 hours ago

    Sure and sometimes that is what happens. Sometimes it's not. We should be doing a lot of things, but have to triage issues and act pragmatically.

    In the case of what I'm currently working on, filing bugs for every issue I found, and then factoring out each fix, and then running each change through the 8 hour ci/cd system, and hoping an unrelated issue doesn't get misattributed to me... No, I'd rather just wrap it up into one coherent refactoring change and be done with it because when I'm done there are several more like it waiting for my attention.

    • t-writescode  15 hours ago

      I don't know your exact situation; and there are sometimes genuinely valid reasons for an 8-hour CI/CD system; but ... man, reducing that down to like 20 minutes (which is possible and often common) would pay as many dividends as all the AI stuff that's been added. Man, like ... holy crap @_@

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blub  18 hours ago

Too many comments about AI read like inadvertent admissions of incompetence or dysfunctional projects.

Couple of WTFs that come to mind:

* How many bugs did one have per commit, that commits have to noticeably grow in order to not have those bugs in the first place?

* How does one even do software engineering if the (best) developers can’t reason about the code?