I am big on reproducibility (nix aficionado) and determinism (flagging test failures are a red-alert, all-hands-on-deck situation in my world) and correctness.
I am also big on testing (the correct things). And nine-nines (big on Elixir).
And... I'm also big on agent-assisted dev. Which requires pretty much every check in the book to stay productive in. And that's fine to me. I've seen bugs that I wouldn't have made myself. And I've also seen my own bugs fixed. They've all gotten fixed in short order. I don't see why this is a problem.
Raise your personal standards.
Thing is, the unreliable-software situation was already untenable before agents (in poor hands) made it worse.
I don’t think the author (or many people) doubt that one can (and some will) find a way that does not “suck”
But it’s pretty clear that most people are not. For whatever reasons (mgmt pressure, trying to get ahead, skill issues, etc) they half ass it, accept the 10% (silent) fail rate and blame the bad outcomes on the AI as if that absolves them. Or, adopt the attitude that 10% fail is fine, and people who say otherwise are being picky, or are anti-ai luddites or whatever. You should accept that things will suck.
If you took a bad but functional AI generated service and transported it back to 2018 it would have been at worst just mediocre. People do seem forget how dreadful devslop was in the past. I'd take an AI generated mess to disentangle every time over a spaghetti codebase that grew organically in the hands of careless managers.
Volume has nothing to do with it, this is discussing code quality. But if you mind me saying so, blame this ridiculous amount of codeslop volume on greedy managers and corpocrats. Developers are artists, they usually ship shitcode when they're under pressure
Good to know your opinion my friend. I think they are, the incentives are for them to hide it and play the corporation ladder climbing game instead, if you think about it.
I certainly do believe that some developers are artists, see for example the IOCCC, and more who are or would like to be artisans, but by and large our colleagues' hearts are closed to the Muses.
Idk, I tend to look at this towards learned helplessness. There sure are the intelligent opportunists trying to ride the hype tides around tech, but we can't really say much when the environment don't foster creativity. How many brilliant devs are out there rotting away at meaningless jobs because they have debt?
volume has everything to do with this. We used to make fun of how overengineered projects can be with stuff like HelloWorld Enterprise Edition, and now we just shrug at that because it's made fast?
No it's because shrugging it off or not is the topic of another discussion. Code quality and noise ratio and absolute noise volume are completely orthogonal in a sense that you can discuss code quality separately to how you deal with a large volume of slop. This discussion is about the former and you are forcing it to be about the later, which is interesting but unrelated.
As far a I can tell, most didn’t bother to see if it worked for the system,p. They just needed to have it compile in their system and then they’d call it done.
pmarreck · · focus · HN ↗
I am also big on testing (the correct things). And nine-nines (big on Elixir).
And... I'm also big on agent-assisted dev. Which requires pretty much every check in the book to stay productive in. And that's fine to me. I've seen bugs that I wouldn't have made myself. And I've also seen my own bugs fixed. They've all gotten fixed in short order. I don't see why this is a problem.
Raise your personal standards.
Thing is, the unreliable-software situation was already untenable before agents (in poor hands) made it worse.
lokar · · focus · HN ↗
But it’s pretty clear that most people are not. For whatever reasons (mgmt pressure, trying to get ahead, skill issues, etc) they half ass it, accept the 10% (silent) fail rate and blame the bad outcomes on the AI as if that absolves them. Or, adopt the attitude that 10% fail is fine, and people who say otherwise are being picky, or are anti-ai luddites or whatever. You should accept that things will suck.
gchamonlive · · focus · HN ↗
lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
It was dreadful, but the volume was a single-digit percentage of what you see now.
Even those develoeprs who made a living opying from SO *still needed to make that code work for their system!"
gchamonlive · · focus · HN ↗
BigTTYGothGF · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think this has ever, as a rule, been true.
gchamonlive · · focus · HN ↗
BigTTYGothGF · · focus · HN ↗
gchamonlive · · focus · HN ↗
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
gchamonlive · · focus · HN ↗
gumby · · focus · HN ↗
Tanjreeve · · focus · HN ↗