Comment by halfcat
17 hours ago
> Haven't typed a line of code or read any code for over 6 months now
> I ask questions to confirm things
Oh my.
As someone who reads the code, I can tell you, asking questions to confirm things is inadequate. The models lie to me, daily.
Every day I have two experiences:
1. I’m blown away by what it can do
2. I say, ”wait, you said this, but the code shows that, so you were just going to leave that endpoint without requiring any authentication??” and I get the “you’re absolutely right, that was my mistake, and you’re right to call it out” song and dance. Daily.
It also adds all kinds of bloat to code, tests, and “documentation”. I’d say I spend ~30% of my dev time picking lines of code or documentation and asking, “why does this exist?” and “what would break if we deleted this line?” and then arguing with it and removing things.
Yeah, I agree, they are far from perfect and make a lot of mistakes.
Truth is, modern software was already quite shit and full of bugs. All major apps had bugs, issues, going down, etc, so users did get used to things not working. I honestly beleive AI coding nowadays, for better or worse, does things better than the average developer.
Yes, it is overly defensive and verbose, but the end result is in general ok and fully functional. Yes, it adds 30 tests and "release gates", and they are not even that useful, most of the times they just act as an extra safety mechanism to make parts of the code immutable, so release fails if the model accidentally changed things.
Another issue with looking at code, is that it's very hard to manually change things anyway. I can't just change a variable from 10 to 20, because I don't know where it is used. I have to ask the model to set that value to 20. It is quite stupid and inefficient, but this is one cost of coding using AI. But, if you do this, things will likely work.
That being said, I've mostly used Astra xhigh since it was released and things just work.
> Another issue with looking at code, is that it's very hard to manually change things anyway. I can't just change a variable from 10 to 20, because I don't know where it is used.
This should be a giant flashing red light. If you can't figure this out, either 1) you're too junior to be effective using AI, or 2) the AI is doing a truly awful job organizing the codebase. In either case, it's a sign to slow things down and understand what's happening before proceeding.
No, the problem is not the code.
Is that that variable might be used in tests, UI, docs, agenr markdown files, other related projects too.
The design spec could say "always use 10px margin", then in code we have a const with value 10 used everywhere. If we update 10 manually in code to 20, then the design spec is now outdated.