And to me, AI should best be used to add rocket fuel to existing practices. Better tests, better observability, more atomic changes instead of big changes, automatic rollback etc.
The more your codebase follows best practices and consistent patterns, the better AI will do and the faster you can move.
Same as humans really, just even faster. I'm also excited that people are finally writing docs and without even any flogging! They're calling the docs "skills" but hey whatever works
Yes, this is indeed a pungent smell. AI code assistants allow whole projects to be refactored and even rewritten in entirely different programming languages and software stacks in a few minutes, sometimes even with one-shot prompts. Most assistants even support creating and maintaining test suites with first-class support. Whatever you prompt, they do it.
And here we are, expected to believe that these tools can't or don't follow best practices?
You keep hearing people saying AI coding assistants and coding agents can easily output working code. With enough work they can easily output that follows your own coding style and restrictions.
If you prompt a coding agent to write code following your personal choices and recommendations and it outputs less than amazing code... What does it tell you?
> Personally I have not seen this amazing code.
You get out of it exactly what you put into it. Garbage in, garbage out. I mean, one of the prompt styles they support is literally "implement this following the style used in this component". And people complain the code generated from your prompts and with your own code as a reference turns out to be crap? Strange. Moreover, code assistants excel at refactoring work.
The model is trained on a ginormous corpus of code. The problem is, most code is shitty. My code isn't.
Using a model means constantly fighting mediocrity, to the point where the trying to prompt it into shape often becomes more work than just writing the goddamn thing myself.
Yes, I can prompt. But I can't prompt understanding into the pattern matching machine. It will always revert to the undesirable mean.
No, I meant what I wrote. I keep hearing people say how LLMs write amazing code now.
That's an odd statement to make, particularly with today's models. They can easily pinpoint concurrency problems and memory management issues. But here you are, complaining they write buggy code. What kind of prompting are you throwing at it?
He answered:
> Well, yeah, who cares?
> This is where we need to differentiate between what truly needs to be clean (critical APIs) and where some random guy coding a product in a week will wipe the floor with a team of engineers with a clean architecture and no product after three months.
> What's more, this "vibe coder" is on the right side of history… Who's to say AI won't be able to just rewrite the code cleanly while keeping the core idea within 6, 12, or 18 months?
> This is also the question that drives business... and in business, "good enough" has almost always trumped "perfect." Except when you're making an ultra-luxury product like a Ferrari or something. Which software almost never is (if ever).
So when head of companies don’t care about quality, they’ll push hard no matter what to have speed.
This is especially true when the people who suffer the consequences of bad software are far removed from the company making it. You'll be forced to spend hours fighting with customer service over errors made by people using that bad software, but it won't impact the CEO of the company who vibe coded it. I hate that we're moving to a world where everything around is getting worse and less reliable while marketing companies try to convince us all that this is somehow progress.
Well lets say it's 18 months from now and AI writes lovely, ideal code. At that moment, the AI would have eliminated the need for AI, right? If the code is good, you can just read it and edit it.
The selling point of AI is that you will embrace that idea that you code is a mile-high stinking garbage heap, so that any human would be overwhelmed by the stench. Only so long as the best strategy for engineering is to pile the garbage as high as possible as fast as possible will the best tool for engineering be AI.
So my counter argument is: just wait 18 months and you can completely skip adopting AI.
Switching to AI development on several of our projects exposed a lot of code that either never worked or didn't work the way that we thought it did.
> And here we are, expected to believe that these tools can't or don't follow best practices?
Uh they don't really. The contradiction you're seeing is actually fictional because that premise is wrong.
That just goes to show how far your experience goes. I have projects in my workspace to support the idea, and your baseless assertion rejecting the whole idea? What's more credible?
> The contradiction you're seeing is actually fictional because that premise is wrong.
Doubling down on baseless assertions means nothing.
Exclusively bad-faith/bait.
___
Edit:
Come to think of it, given the name, it might _actually_ be just an agentic LLM tasked with trolling HN.
That would be kinda fun ngl
I don’t think AI actually changes that we should always be questioning everything, including how much we question at a time.