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The highest quality codebase

(gricha.dev)
559 points Gricha | 12 comments | 08 Dec 25 21:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.897s | source | bottom
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xnorswap ◴[11 Dec 25 16:02 UTC] No.46233056[source]▶
Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems.

"Hey claude, I get this error message: <X>", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could.

"Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest.

It suggested enthusiastically a library for <work domain> and it was all "Recommended" about it, but when I pointed out that the library had been considered and rejected because <issue>, it understood and wrote up why that library suffered from that issue and why it was therefore unsuitable.

There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. It can do structured problems very well, and it can transform unstructured data very well, but it can't deal with unstructured problems very well.

That may well change, so I don't want to embed that thought too deeply into my own priors, because the LLM space seems to evolve rapidly. I wouldn't want to find myself blind to the progress because I write it off from a class of problems.

But right now, the best way to help an LLM is have a deep understanding of the problem domain yourself, and just leverage it to do the grunt-work that you'd find boring.

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pdntspa ◴[11 Dec 25 16:23 UTC] No.46233365[source]▶
That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code.

I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the style principles articulated in its AGENTS.md file. (As it tends to forget a lot of rules like DRY)

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1. rootnod3 ◴[11 Dec 25 16:51 UTC] No.46233782[source]▶
Cool cool cool. So if you use LLMs as junior devs, let me ask you how future awesome senior devs like you will come around? From WHAT job experience? From what coding struggle?
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2. eightysixfour ◴[11 Dec 25 16:55 UTC] No.46233836[source]▶
What would you like individual contributors to do about it, exactly? Refuse to use it, even though this person said they're happier and more fulfilled at work?

I'm asking because I legitimately have not figured out an answer to this problem.

3. bpt3 ◴[11 Dec 25 16:57 UTC] No.46233876[source]▶
Why is that a developer's problem? If anything, they are incentivized to avoid creating future competition in the job market.
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4. fluidcruft ◴[11 Dec 25 17:08 UTC] No.46234025[source]▶
How do you get junior devs if your concept of the LLM is that it's "a principal engineer" that "do[es] not ask [you] any questions"?

Also, I'm pretty sure junior devs can use directing a LLM to learn from mistakes faster. Let them play. Soon enough they're going to be better than all of us anyway. The same way widespread access to strong chess computers raised the bar at chess clubs.

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5. pdntspa ◴[11 Dec 25 17:22 UTC] No.46234215[source]▶
My last job there was effectively a gun held to the back of my head, ordering me to use this stuff. And this started about a year ago, when the tooling for agentic dev was absolutely atrocious, because we had a CTO who had the biggest most raging boner for anything that offered even a whiff of "AI".

Unfortunately the bar is being raised on us. If you can't hang with the new order you are out of a job. I promise I was one of the holdouts who resisted this the most. It's probably why I got laid off last spring.

Thankfully, as of this last summer, agentic dev started to really get good, and my opinion made a complete 180. I used the off time to knock out a personal project in a month or two's worth of time, that would have taken me a year+ the old way. I leveraged that experience to get me where I am now.

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6. rootnod3 ◴[11 Dec 25 17:40 UTC] No.46234487[source]▶
I don't think the chess analogy grabs here. In chess, you play _against_ the chess computer. Take the same approach and let the chess computer play FOR the player and see how far he gets.
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7. rootnod3 ◴[11 Dec 25 17:44 UTC] No.46234542[source]▶
Ok, now assume you start relying on it and let's assume cloud flare has another outage. You just go and clock out for the day saying "can't work, agent is down"?

I don't think we'll be out of jobs. Maybe temporarily. But those jobs come back. The energy and money drain that LLMs are, are just not sustainable.

I mean, it's cool that you got the project knocked out in a month or two, but if you'd sit down now without an LLM and try to measure the quality of that codebase, would you be 100% content? Speed is not always a good metric. Sure, 1 -2 months for a project is nice, but isn't especially a personal project more about the fun of doing the project and learning something from it and sharpening your skills?

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8. rootnod3 ◴[11 Dec 25 17:45 UTC] No.46234555[source]▶
It's not a problem for the senior dev directly, but maybe down the road. And it definitely is a problem for the company once said senior dev leaves or retires.

Seriously, long term thinking went out the window long time ago, didn't it?

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9. fluidcruft ◴[11 Dec 25 17:55 UTC] No.46234667{3}[source]▶
Maybe. I don't think adversarial vs not is as important as gaining experience. Ultimately both are problem solving tasks and learning instincts about which approaches work best in certain situations.

I'm probably a pretty shitty developer by HN standards but I generally have to build a prototype to fully understand and explore problem and iterate designs and LLMs have been pretty good for me as trainers for learning things I'm not familiar with. I do have a certain skill set, but the non-domain stuff can be really slow and tedious work. I can recognize "good enough" and "clean" and I think the next generation can use that model very well to be become native with how to succeed with these tools.

Let me put it this way: people don't have to be hired by the best companies to gain experience using best practices anymore.

10. pdntspa ◴[11 Dec 25 18:35 UTC] No.46235155{3}[source]▶
When the POS system goes down at a restaurant they'll revert to pen and paper. Can't imagine its much different in that case.
11. platevoltage ◴[11 Dec 25 19:35 UTC] No.46236083[source]▶
There's that long term thinking that the tech industry, and really every other publicly traded company is known for.
12. bpt3 ◴[11 Dec 25 21:44 UTC] No.46237620{3}[source]▶
No, long term thinking didn't go out the window.

It is definitely a problem for the company. How is it a problem for the senior dev at any point?

What incentive do they have to aid the company at the expense of their own *long term* career prospects?