Comment by montfort | Hacker News Reader

Comment by montfort | Hacker News Reader

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I suppose our opinions stem from different experiences. I don't expect AI to do all the work with just a paragraph of instructions. Some people do, and they get very poor results. I design large, complex systems based on microservices, and so far I haven't encountered any of the obvious and glaring errors that other users report. For each project, I've spent two or three weeks working on thousands of lines of specification documents, user stories, plans, and task lists, using DDD. My prompts consist of dozens of files with 10,000-20,000 lines in total. Because the implementation tasks are extensive and atomic, AI has worked very well for me in solving them.

My experience shows that AI can program like the best programmers; its code is very good when given precise instructions, just like a human. I've encountered problems elsewhere, such as anti-patterns in unwired modules, which are "large-scale" implementation errors. I'm resolving these thanks to an open source tool I'm building for AI cognitive governance, and it's yielded excellent results for me. The code produced at both small and large scales is high quality.

In my experience, people experiencing gross AI errors are doing so because they aren't giving it precise instructions. And by precise instructions, I don't mean a highly refined prompt or "vibe-coding"; I'm talking about instructions thousands of lines long, just like the ones we create when developing with human teams.

If two people are using the same model, and one reports that the AI "neglected to handle a case where a database could have multiple rows with the same ID", while the other says they can develop a huge microservices system with multiple databases without any major issues, perhaps one of them isn't using the tool optimally, based on my experience.

Yeah, your experience is definitely different than mine. When I’m working with human teams, I don’t spend weeks giving them thousands of lines of precise instructions. We work incrementally, having fairly brief conversations to make sure we’re on the same page about the tasks we’re tackling, and then letting individual pairs work out the details of each task… which they do, because they’re experienced professionals.

For example, the project we were working on was to add support for reading a session cookie to a codebase that, up until now, had used a different kind of auth. Fairly straightforward, everybody knows what a session cookie is and how it works. In about 10 minutes, we decided on the big picture design elements (how it was going to fit into our existing system, what we needed to add/modify, etc.) and the corresponding tasks.

One of the things we wanted was an “UntrustedCookie” class to represent the cookie. It was meant to follow a pattern we had already established for other user-controlled input. Our HttpServerRequest object was going have a new getCookie() method that returned it.

This would have been about 30 min of work for a pair to implement, including tests. It’s pretty trivial. No further documentation is needed.

Anyway, I’m glad AI is working for you. My experience is that it often fails, and does so in ways that experienced humans don’t.

Exactly, that's precisely the point. They're different experiences. What I achieve now with three weeks of theoretical work, other teams achieve incrementally over several months in iterable work blocks.

The interesting thing is what you mentioned, that "no further documentation is needed." In the industries I work in, it's mandatory (with or without AI, and it's been that way for many years) to have everything fully documented from the design process onward. For me, it hasn't been difficult to work this way with AI because I know and have practiced the discipline of documenting decisions for a long time. For my clients, it's an essential accountability requirement.

These documents now have a dual purpose because they now serve to manage cognitive discipline too, so that agents do a better job than they would with vibe coding. Because without that discipline, what you say is absolutely true: AI agents do a terrible job and only hinder the good workflows already adopted by professional teams.

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