Comment by dylanhouli

One thing I do is ask the LLM to write me a walkthrough of the code. LLMs are pretty good at generating documentation like HTML slideshows or whatever else.

I mean, I've had useful software that I don't understand how it works where I am stuck hoping some small company continues to maintain it. And I've had some of those companies go out of business and leave me with useless software that I eventually have to replace once it no longer works on my machine.

Having the code that I can dump into an LLM to understand myself or have it alter it seems better than that.

> The agent will fix a bug when I tell it to, but only in exactly one place. I'll notice that another place has that bug later and have to redo it. It's the sort of thing that I would know to check for if I were fixing it myself.

I see the same in e.g. simple CSS. I ask ChatGPT to apply styling X to aĺl instances of say a UI control type. Then to another. Later I ask for a tweak of X. Bot updates some but not all instances. It didn't create a single class for all. No intelligence seen.

The most remarkable fails are simpler though. E.g. at version 303 I ask "Revert to version 299". I get 299 with 303's edits. Bot explains it interpreted "Revert" to mean something no intelligent programmer would.

And most importantly, these are just the ones I directly notice. To see the total, I have to read through and understand the most repulsive code I've seen in my life.

The only way to be satisfied with bot code is by having exceptionally low expectations. And never ever let yourself be kidded that your helper is more than a stochastic parrot gorged on stackoverflow etc.

I'm not sure what is ridiculous about suggesting people take a stance of openness and curiousness when confronted with new situations. I genuinely don't understand what people have to lose by building some throw-away experiments without reading the code.

I do believe the subsidies offered on Pro accounts driven by the current competition make access to the best coding models and harnesses as cheap as they will ever be.

> 'Now is the cheapest time it will ever be to experiment'?

First hit is free ;)

I guess the question is: did the project you worked on fail? As in, you couldn't achieve the outcome you were trying to achieve? Or at some point did you sneak a look at the code and recoil in revulsion? What was the failure state?

Was this with the latest models (Fable/Opus 5.5 or equivalent) or an older model in a 3rd party harness?

Are you in the camp of: "if at first you don't succeed, never ever try again".

Please don't do this here.

(You're welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully, of course.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Issue: I am still unable to stop myself from doing line-by-line code review

Response: Try experimenting in a low stakes environment

From Google: "Exposure therapy is a psychological treatment designed to help people confront their fears, break cycles of avoidance, and reduce anxiety."

I think the intended takeaway is to learn to solve those problems without line by line review. Start by being hands off on a low stakes project, and see how the model fails. Then, come up with, and try, solutions that aren't you doing archeology.

Apple's iPhone Duo seems like it'll be a huge hit.. how many years after the competitors?

They've built an entire strategy around moving slow and doing it better

If they move quickly by shipping crap they're just running towards a wall, the responsible thing is to not follow them.

fomo nonsense. not everyone has to jump off the cliff just because you are.

Do you have any data backing this statement? Or is it just your experience?

> it doesn’t impact me

so long as his software isn't used for anything that can affect you

This is true but a lot of that history and culture has not been capable of producing software which has better quality than what came before. Around here banks are spending hundreds of millions trying to exit mainframe systems, and they've been failing for the better part of a decade. This despite having hundreds of people working on "modern" software paradigms in "modern" languages.

I do think the capabilities of AI depends a lot on how you work. If you're doing very low abstraction, fail fast defensive programming in something like Rust then it's fairly good at writing code with high quality. If you're working in some OOP language with tons of freedom, then my experience is that it's usually not better (or worse) than most human programmers, but certainly much worse than some.

I've got decades of experience in enterprise development and I've also been an external examiner for CS students. We have people with no coding back ground vibe coding internal tools in Python which are terrible, but not really worse than what we've previously bought from some of the cheaper coding houses around here. At the same time we have AI writing internal SDK's and libraries in Rust which will frankly write better code than I do on a thursday afternoon after too many meetings and too little sleep because the children kept me awake all week.

Good code can mean a lot of things though. If you're deep into clean SOLID DRY OOP programming I suspect that an AI will produce unreadable horrible code, much worse than most humans. On the flip-side the AI probably knows the difference between a generator and looping over a List. It probably also knows more about JVM optimization than most of those banking programmers trying to replace COBOL with JAVA.'

I doubt Antropic is a good sample though. Bun is written in Rust and it's a single purpose software, which seem to be an optimal environment for LLM's.

  > those people don't care about their customers

if it was any other industry like medicine, food, or construction etc, could they get away with just shipping products where they have no idea whats in it?

where things like "it tastes good to me" or "cement didn't crumble when i hit it with a hammer" is good enough to ship we'd be inundated with lawsuits and customer claims... its a total joke where the software industry is headed

The biggest concern is that AI can doxx you and find where you live if your code sucks. If that doesn't scare you, nothing will.

I think a more generous interpretation of the parent comment would have been: "No one [in business] cares about good code" .

Your end users certainly don't either, heck they'll gladly sit there and scroll through their phone until the 50GB React app loads.

There’s a little irony about the example you picked of the GPL, just because in the US the output of an LLM cannot be covered under copyright. The GPL works as an assignment of rights under copyright.

This is, of course, tangential to your point.