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AI should only run as fast as we can catch up

(higashi.blog)
196 points yuedongze | 2 comments | 08 Dec 25 17:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.504s | source
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blauditore ◴[08 Dec 25 18:26 UTC] No.46195811[source]▶
All these engineers who claim to write most code through AI - I wonder what kind of codebase that is. I keep on trying, but it always ends up producing superficially okay-looking code, but getting nuances wrong. Also fails to fix them (just changes random stuff) if pointed to said nuances.

I work on a large product with two decades of accumulated legacy, maybe that's the problem. I can see though how generating and editing a simple greenfield web frontend project could work much better, as long as actual complexity is low.

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bob1029 ◴[08 Dec 25 19:50 UTC] No.46196747[source]▶
I have my best successes by keeping things constrained to method-level generation. Most of the things I dump into ChatGPT look like this:

  public static double ScoreItem(Span<byte> candidate, Span<byte> target)
  {
     //TODO: Return the normalized Levenshtein distance between the 2 byte sequences.
     //... any additional edge cases here ...
  }
I think generating more than one method at a time is playing with fire. Individual methods can be generated by the LLM and tested in isolation. You can incrementally build up and trust your understanding of the problem space by going a little bit slower. If the LLM is operating over a whole set of methods at once, it is like starting over each time you have to iterate.
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1. samdoesnothing ◴[08 Dec 25 21:07 UTC] No.46197658[source]▶
I do this but with copilot. Write a comment and then spam opt-tab and 50% of the time it ends up doing what I want and I can read it line-by-line before tabbing the next one.

Genuine productivity boost but I don't feel like it's AI slop, sometimes it feels like its actually reading my mind and just preventing me from having to type...

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2. jerf ◴[08 Dec 25 21:39 UTC] No.46197999[source]▶
I've settled in on this as well for most of my day-to-day coding. A lot of extremely fancy tab completion, using the agent only for manipulation tasks I can carefully define. I'm currently in a "write lots of code" mode which affects that, I think. In a maintenance mode I could see doing more agent prompting. It gives me a chance to catch things early and then put in a correct pattern for it to continue forward with. And honestly for a lot of tasks it's not particularly slower than "ask it to do something, correct its five errors, tweak the prompt" work flow.

I've had net-time-savings with bigger agentic tasks, but I still have to check it line-by-line when it is done, because it takes lazy shortcuts and sometimes just outright gets things wrong.

Big productivity boost, it takes out the worst of my job, but I still can't trust it at much above the micro scale.

I wish I could give a system prompt for the tab complete; there's a couple of things it does over and over that I'm sure I could prompt away but there's no way to feed that in that I know of.