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What software development world do you live in where significant refactoring and rewrites aren’t commonplace? Every project I’ve ever had insider knowledge abo

by Mtinie 2y ago

What software development world do you live in where significant refactoring and rewrites aren’t commonplace? Every project I’ve ever had insider knowledge about started as a prototype and then was extensively reworked until it met the needs of the team…until the next set of requirements dropped and the cycle repeats. If agent systems allow teams to spin up and test prototypes faster than they previously could do without the agents, isn’t that a useful and valuable step in the right direction? Addendum: After rereading my comment I realize it may come off as argumentative when it was intended to offer a perspective of not requiring more from the current state of the tech than it offers. “Early days” and all that :)

musha68k 2y ago
Prototypes unfortunately often stick. IMO refactoring someone else's code is less efficient vs whatever code I wrote myself. I'm pondering net productivity. Have you personally deployed anything based on agent results (predominantly)? I'm just trying to gauge if the current state ("early days") is actually worth investing time and money in from a professional perspective. In my experience, hype often precedes actual usefulness by a significant margin. TL;DR are we there yet?
- Mtinie 2y ago
  I have an API project in development where the majority of the code has been written through Claude Code. It offers an integration of the Congress.gov and GovInfo.gov APIs, and analysis tools for their respective (somewhat overlapping but not always) public information. I put significant effort in constructing the product & project requirements beforehand and have built a number of simple tools as I ran into roadblocks or inefficiencies, so I can attest to there being a large amount of hype. I can also comfortably state that without the use of LLMs, I would not be this far along. Having a background in software development (UX side) and a deep interest in technology gives me some insight in to which questions to ask and when to “throw a flag” and ask the LLM to explain why it’s doing something. I don’t believe the hype around one-shot enterprise applications, but the current state of AI programming is usable if people take the care they hopefully would with their own output.
  - musha68k 2y ago
    Cool, thanks for sharing!
cess11 2y ago
Is this faster than the CLI project management tools we already have and things like git checkout -b? How?
- Mtinie 2y ago
  This particular MCP server? No idea. I suspect it is just a different way, rather than a better way. For tasks like that I personally use pre- and post-commit scripts to run all of my test validation, coverage, Ruff, etc. and output the results as “Current Code Quality” summary reports that are shared with my agents for context.

by Mtinie 2y ago

musha68k 2y ago

Prototypes unfortunately often stick. IMO refactoring someone else's code is less efficient vs whatever code I wrote myself. I'm pondering net productivity. Have you personally deployed anything based on agent results (predominantly)? I'm just trying to gauge if the current state ("early days") is actually worth investing time and money in from a professional perspective. In my experience, hype often precedes actual usefulness by a significant margin. TL;DR are we there yet?

Mtinie 2y ago
I have an API project in development where the majority of the code has been written through Claude Code. It offers an integration of the Congress.gov and GovInfo.gov APIs, and analysis tools for their respective (somewhat overlapping but not always) public information. I put significant effort in constructing the product & project requirements beforehand and have built a number of simple tools as I ran into roadblocks or inefficiencies, so I can attest to there being a large amount of hype. I can also comfortably state that without the use of LLMs, I would not be this far along. Having a background in software development (UX side) and a deep interest in technology gives me some insight in to which questions to ask and when to “throw a flag” and ask the LLM to explain why it’s doing something. I don’t believe the hype around one-shot enterprise applications, but the current state of AI programming is usable if people take the care they hopefully would with their own output.
- musha68k 2y ago
  Cool, thanks for sharing!

cess11 2y ago

Is this faster than the CLI project management tools we already have and things like git checkout -b? How?

Mtinie 2y ago
This particular MCP server? No idea. I suspect it is just a different way, rather than a better way. For tasks like that I personally use pre- and post-commit scripts to run all of my test validation, coverage, Ruff, etc. and output the results as “Current Code Quality” summary reports that are shared with my agents for context.