Popular/hot comments

(www.gauge.sh)

Show context

perrygeo ◴[14 Nov 24 16:50 UTC] No.42138092[source]▶

> Companies with relatively young, high-quality codebases benefit the most from generative AI tools, while companies with gnarly, legacy codebases will struggle to adopt them. In other words, the penalty for having a ‘high-debt’ codebase is now larger than ever.

This mirrors my experience using LLMs on personal projects. They can provide good advice only to the extent that your project stays within the bounds of well-known patterns. As soon as your codebase gets a little bit "weird" (ie trying to do anything novel and interesting), the model chokes, starts hallucinating, and makes your job considerably harder.

Put another way, LLMs make the easy stuff easier, but royally screws up the hard stuff. The gap does appear to be widening, not shrinking. They work best where we need them the least.

replies(24): >>42138267 #>>42138350 #>>42138403 #>>42138537 #>>42138558 #>>42138582 #>>42138674 #>>42138683 #>>42138690 #>>42138884 #>>42139109 #>>42139189 #>>42140096 #>>42140476 #>>42140626 #>>42140809 #>>42140878 #>>42141658 #>>42141716 #>>42142239 #>>42142373 #>>42143688 #>>42143791 #>>42151146 #

1. comboy ◴[14 Nov 24 17:22 UTC] No.42138558[source]▶

>>42138092 #

Same experience, but I think it's going to change. As models get better, their context window keeps growing while mine stays the same.

To be clear, our context window can be really huge if you are living the project. But not if you are new to it or even getting back to it after a few years.

replies(1): >>42138736 #

2. MrMcCall ◴[14 Nov 24 17:36 UTC] No.42138736[source]▶

>>42138558 (TP) #

Here's the secret to grokking a software project: a given codebase is not understandable without understanding how and why it was built; i.e. if you didn't build it, you're not going to understand why it is the way it is.

In theory, the codebase should be, as it is, understandable (and it is, with a great deal of rigorous study). In reality, that's simply not the case, not for any non-trivial software system.

replies(3): >>42139319 #>>42139451 #>>42142633 #

3. thfuran ◴[14 Nov 24 18:19 UTC] No.42139319[source]▶

>>42138736 #

So your secret to understanding code is: Abandon hope all ye who enter here?

replies(2): >>42139724 #>>42142422 #

4. gwervc ◴[14 Nov 24 18:29 UTC] No.42139451[source]▶

>>42138736 #

Too bad most projects don't document any of those decisions.

5. marcosdumay ◴[14 Nov 24 18:52 UTC] No.42139724{3}[source]▶

>>42139319 #

Oh, you will understand why things were built. It's inevitable.

And all of that understanding will come from people complaining about you fixing a bug.