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Comment by 3036e4 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe optimistic, but reading posts like this makes me hopeful that AI-assisted coding will drive people to design more modular and sanely organized code, to reduce the amount of context required for each task. Sadly pretty much all code I have worked with have been giant messes of everything being connected to everything else, causing the entire project to be potential context for anything.

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It's really very good at that. Frequently, I'll have something I've been working on over the years that has turned into an interconnected mess. "Split this code into modules of separated concerns". Bam, done. I used Claude for the first time last week and gave it a 2k line PowerShell script and it neatly pulled it apart into 5 working modules on the first try. Worked exactly the same, and ended up with better comments too.

So I've done that sort of refactoring a lot, albeit on real code in much bigger systems, not a script. Lots of coders won't do this, they'll just keep adding to the crap, crazy big module.

I always end up with a vastly smaller code base. Like 2000 lines turns into 800 lines or something like that.

Did that happen too or did the AI just do a glorified 'extract method', that any decent IDE can already do without AI?

I use AI, I'm not anti it, but on the other hand I keep seeing these gushing posts where I'm like 'but your ide could already do that, just click the quick refactoring button'.

It ended up being less, yeah, but not by that much, maybe 15%. Thing is, there was no "extract methods" possible. It was an old user script creation tool that had been modified over the last 10 years. If it were that easy, I would have just done it myself.

What this shows me is that it truly understands all the things this script was supposed to do and was able to organize it better, while not breaking any functionality.

Fair enough, I think it's positive that it did reduce it down to an extent.

I think this is exactly why microservices will rise sharply. As AI-assisted coding grows, the natural push will be toward smaller, well-bounded contexts where both humans and AI can operate more effectively.

Guess the name: In 2015 I was preaching that ____ simplfies the mental model of your web app, makes everything performant, the api will dominate and endure for decades. Answer: React. Soon, we were feeling the induced demand for features and timelines till we regressed to our natural "hair on fire" state. AI is (not just) a better footgun.

It does, you're essentially forced to write good coding guidelines and documentation.

LLMs will write code this way if you ask but you have to know to ask.

At that(/what) point does it become harder for a human to grok a project?

That's always how it works no matter how good the model is. I'm surprised people keep forgetting this. If no one has the theory then the artifacts are almost unmaintainable.

You can end up doing this with entirely human written code too. Good software devs can see it from a mile away.

It depends if you're willing to drop the $30 for the super version :)

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