Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

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- is it understandable

Yes you can ask the agent anything about it and interrogate it until you understand.

- is it maintainable

Yes it’s easy to ask the ai to add new features or to refactor it entirely.

- how much work is adding new features

Depends, it could just be one prompt, it’s usually many prompts. If the refactor is large it can take weeks. But before AI something g equivalent would take months.

- is it written in a way that adding new features means rewriting a lot of it

Usually no, but that depends on how well the agent is being directed and what the features are. If you come up with a feature that requires a new architecture, ai makes it doable rather than saying “would be nice but we’d also have to implement this whole new architecture and that’s a lot of work”

- is it written in a consistent style

Styles can be applied mechanically with linters and formatters, so as much as any codebase written by multiple people.

I've seen AI be wrong about things often enough to know that none of what you said is particularly true. Rather, most of it holds true most of the time. But not enough.

> Styles can be applied mechanically with linters and formatters, so as much as any codebase written by multiple people.

I'm talking more of a higher level than this - more of coding/design patterns that are common for the team.

> Rather, most of it holds true most of the time. But not enough.

I see it be wrong about things all day every day. And yet, IME it's correct enough for it to be controllable. It doesn't have to hold up all of the time, it just has to respond to corrections when they're issued in a loop so that it converges to a correct solution. And it does, despite the mistakes.

In one of my other posts in this thread I detail some of the the ways it's confounded me, but those issues have caused me to harden validation mechanisms rather than say "this thing makes mistakes so I can't use it to write software".

> I'm talking more of a higher level than this - more of coding/design patterns that are common for the team.

Do you have a concrete example?

What people don't understand that programming is very much an art. You iteratively work on it ripping parts out, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, while also rewriting and then rewriting every time a new feature, bug fix or scaling changes are needed.

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