6 ms·

I’ve always been the kind of developer that aims to have more red lines than green ones in my diffs. I like writing libraries so we can create hundreds of integ

I’ve always been the kind of developer that aims to have more red lines than green ones in my diffs. I like writing libraries so we can create hundreds of integration tests declaratively. I’m the kind of developer that disappears for two days and comes back with a 10x speedup because I found two loop variables that should be switched. There is no place for me in this environment. I’d not that I couldn’t use the tools to make so much code, it’s that AI use makes the metric for success speed-to-production. The solution to bad code is more code. AI will never produce a deletion. Publish or perish has come for us and it’s sad. It makes me feel old just like my Python programming made the mainframe people feel old. I wonder what will make the AI developers feel old…

pja 2y ago
> Unseen were all the sleepless nights we experienced from untested sql queries and regexes and misconfigurations he had pushed in his effort to look good. It always came back to a lack of testing edge cases and an eagerness to ship. If you do this you are creating a rod for your own back: You need management to see the failures & the time it takes to fix them, otherwise they will assume everything is fine & wonderful with their new toy & proceed with their plan to inflict it on everyone, oblivious to the true costs + benefits.
- lovich 2y ago
  >If you do this you are creating a rod for your own back: You need management to see the failures & the time it takes to fix them, otherwise they will assume everything is fine & wonderful with their new toy & proceed with their plan to inflict it on everyone, oblivious to the true costs + benefits. If at every company I work for, my manager's average 7-8 months in their role as _my_ manager, and I am switching jobs every 2-3 years because companies would rather rehire their entire staff than give out raises that are even a portion of the market growth, why would I care? Not that the market is currently in that state, but that's how a large portion of tech companies were operating for the past decade. Long term consequences don't matter because there are no longer term relationships.
NortySpock 2y ago
I think there will still be room for "debugging AI slop-code" and "performance-turning AI slop-code" and "cranking up the strictness of the linter (or type-checker for dynamically-typed languages) to chase out silly bugs" , not to mention the need for better languages / runtime that give better guarantees about correctness. It's the front-end of the hype cycle. The tech-debt problems will come home to roost in a year or two.
- fc417fc802 2y ago
  > not to mention the need for better languages / runtime that give better guarantees about correctness. Use LLM to write Haskell. Problem solved?
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  > I think there will still be room for "debugging AI slop-code" and "performance-turning AI slop-code" Ah yes, maintenance, the most fun and satisfying part of the job. /s
  - WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
    Congrats, you’ve been promoted to be the cost center. And sloppers will get to the top by cranking out features you will need to maintain.
    - popularonion 2y ago
      > slopper new 2025 slang just dropped
      - bobnamob 2y ago
        Just wait till 'slopper' starts getting classified as a slur
        WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
        "Slopper" maybe not, but "slophead"...
philistine 2y ago
> AI will never produce a deletion. That, right here, is a world-shaking statement. Bravo.
- QuadrupleA 2y ago
  Not quite true though - I've occasionally passed a codebase to DeepSeek to have it simplify, and it does a decent job. Can even "code golf" if you ask it. But the sentiment is true, by default current LLMs produce verbose, overcomplicated code
- esafak 2y ago
  Today's assistants can refactor, which includes deletions.
  - furyofantares 2y ago
    They can do something that looks a lot like refactoring but they suck extremely hard at it, if it's of any considerable size at all.
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      Which is just moving the goalposts, considering that we started at "AI will never..." You can't win an argument with people who don't care if they're wrong, and someone who begins a sentence that way falls into that category.
      - furyofantares 2y ago
        The guy who said "AI will never" is obviously wrong. So is the guy who replied that they already can. I'm not moving the goalposts to point out that this is also wrong.
- Eliezer 2y ago
  And if it isn't already false it will be false in 6 months, or 1.5 years on the outside. AI is a moving target, and the oldest people among you might remember a time in the 1750s when it didn't talk to you about code at all.
rqtwteye 2y ago
You have to go lower down the stack. Don't use AI but write the AI. For the foreseeable future there is a lot of opportunity to make the AI faster. I am sure assembly programmers were horrified at the code the first C compilers produced. And I personally am horrified by the inefficiency of python compared to the C++ code I used to write. We always have traded faster development for inefficiency.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  C solved the horrible machine code problem by inflicting programmers with the concept of undefined behavior, where blunt instruments called optimizers take a machete to your code. There's a very expensive document locked up somewhere in the ISO vault that tells you what you can and can't write in C, and if you break any of those rules the compiler is free to write whatever it wants. This created a league of incredibly elitist[0] programmers who, having mastered what they thought was the rules of C, insisted to everyone else that the real problem was you not understanding C, not the fact that C had made itself a nightmare to program in. C is bad soil to plant a project in even if you know where the poison is and how to avoid it. The inefficiency of Python[1] is downstream of a trauma response to C and all the many, many ways to shoot yourself in the foot with it. Garbage collection and bytecode are tithes paid to absolve oneself of the sins of C. It's not a matter of Python being "faster to write, harder to execute" as much as Python being used as a defense mechanism. In contrast, the trade-off from AI is unclear, aside from the fact that you didn't spend time writing it, and thus aren't learning anything from it. It's one thing to sacrifice performance for stability; versus sacrificing efficiency and understanding for faster code churn. I don't think the latter is a good tradeoff! That's how we got under-baked and developer-hostile ecosystems like C to begin with! [0] The opposite of a "DEI hire" is an "APE hire", where APE stands for "Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion" [1] I'm using Python as a stand-in for any memory-safe programming language that makes use of a bytecode interpreter that manipulates runtime-managed memory objects.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Why was bytecode needed to absolve ourselves of the sins of C?
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
If the company values that 10x speedup, there is absolutely still a place for you in this environment. Only now it's going to take five days instead of two, because it's going to be harder to track that down in the less-well-structured stuff that AI produces.
- Leynos 2y ago
  Why are you letting the AI construct poorly structured code? You should be discussing an architectural plan with it first and only signing off on the code design when you are comfortable with it.
candiddevmike 2y ago
I wonder what the impact of LLM codegen will have on open source projects like Kubernetes and Linux.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  I haven't really seen what Linus thinks of LLMs but I'm curious I suspect he is pretty unimpressed by the code that LLMs produce given his history with code he thinks is subpar, but what do I know
  - fifilura 2y ago
    Not really. https://blog.mathieuacher.com/LinusTorvaldsLLM/ https://blog.mathieuacher.com/LinusTorvaldsLLM/
ajjenkins 2y ago
AI can definitely produce a deletion. In fact, I commonly use AI to do this. Copy some code and prompt the AI to make the code simpler or more concise. The output will usually be fewer lines of code. Unless you meant that AI won’t remove entire features from the code. But AI can do that too if you prompt it to. I think the bigger issue is that companies don’t put enough value on removing things and only focus on adding new features. That’s not a problem with AI though.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I messed around with Copilot for a while and this is one of the things that actually really impressed me. It was very good at taking a messy block of code, and simplifying it by removing unnecessary stuff, sometimes reducing it to a one line lambda. Very helpful!
  - buggy6257 2y ago
    > sometimes reducing it to a one line lambda. Please don't do this :) Readable code is better than clever code!
    - bluefirebrand 2y ago
      Especially "clever" code that is AI generated! At least with human-written clever code you can trust that somebody understood it at one point but the idea of trusting AI generated code that is "clever" makes my skin crawl
      - Terr_ 2y ago
        Also, the ways in which a (sane) human will screw-up tend to follow internal logic that other humans have learned to predict, recognize, or understand.
        ben_w 2y ago
        Most devs I've worked with are sane, unfortunately the rare exceptions were not easy to predict or understand.
stuckinhell 2y ago
AI can do deletions and refactors, and 10x speedups. You just need to push the latest models constantly.
DeathArrow 2y ago
>AI use makes the metric for success speed-to-production Wasn't it like that always for most companies? Get to market fast, add features fast, sell them, add more features?
- AdieuToLogic 2y ago
  >>AI use makes the metric for success speed-to-production > Wasn't it like that always for most companies? Get to market fast, add features fast, sell them, add more features? This reminds me of an old software engineering adage. When delivering a system, there are three choices stakeholders have: You can have it fast, You can have it cheap, You can have it correct. Pick any two.
762236 2y ago
AI writes my unit tests. I clean them up a bit to ensure I've gone over every line of code. But it is nice to speed through the boring parts, and without bringing declarative constructs into play (imperative coding is how most of us think).
gitpusher 2y ago
> I wonder what will make the AI developers feel old… When they look at the calendar and it says May 2025 instead of April
8note 2y ago
> AI will never produce a deletion. I'm currently reading an LLM generated deletion. its hard to get an LLM to work with existing tools, but not impossible
bitwize 2y ago
If you've ever had to work alongside someone who has, or whose job it is to obtain, all the money... you will find that time to market is very often the ONLY criterion that matters. Turning the crank to churn out some AI slop is well worth it if it means having something to go live with tomorrow as opposed to a month from now. LevelsIO's flight simulator sucked. But his payoff-to-effort ratio is so absurdly high, as a business type you have to be brain-dead to leave money on the table by refusing to try replicating his success.
- bookman117 2y ago
  It feels like LLMs are doing to coding what the internet/attention economy did to journalism.
  - bitwize 2y ago
    Yeah, future math professors explaining the Prisoners' Dilemma are going to use clickbait journalism and AI slop as examples instead of today's canonical ones, like steroid use among athletes.
KurSix 2y ago
You're describing the kind of developer who builds foundations, not just features. And yeah, that kind of thinking gets lost when the only thing that's measured is how fast you can ship something that looks like it works
dyauspitr 2y ago
AI deletes a lot of you tell it to optimize code and the new code will pass all the tests…
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cies 2y ago
> I wonder what will make the AI developers feel old… They will not feel old because they will enter into bliss of Singularity(TM). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
kkukshtel 2y ago
Claude Code removed an npm package (and its tree of deps) from my project and wrote its own more simple component that did the core part of what I needed the package to do. I think we'll be okay and likely better off.
rolandog 2y ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I also feel like I'm sometimes reliving the King Neptune vs Spongebob meme equivalent of coding. No room for Think, Plan, Execute... Only throw spaghetti code at wall.

pja 2y ago

> Unseen were all the sleepless nights we experienced from untested sql queries and regexes and misconfigurations he had pushed in his effort to look good. It always came back to a lack of testing edge cases and an eagerness to ship. If you do this you are creating a rod for your own back: You need management to see the failures & the time it takes to fix them, otherwise they will assume everything is fine & wonderful with their new toy & proceed with their plan to inflict it on everyone, oblivious to the true costs + benefits.

lovich 2y ago
>If you do this you are creating a rod for your own back: You need management to see the failures & the time it takes to fix them, otherwise they will assume everything is fine & wonderful with their new toy & proceed with their plan to inflict it on everyone, oblivious to the true costs + benefits. If at every company I work for, my manager's average 7-8 months in their role as _my_ manager, and I am switching jobs every 2-3 years because companies would rather rehire their entire staff than give out raises that are even a portion of the market growth, why would I care? Not that the market is currently in that state, but that's how a large portion of tech companies were operating for the past decade. Long term consequences don't matter because there are no longer term relationships.

NortySpock 2y ago

I think there will still be room for "debugging AI slop-code" and "performance-turning AI slop-code" and "cranking up the strictness of the linter (or type-checker for dynamically-typed languages) to chase out silly bugs" , not to mention the need for better languages / runtime that give better guarantees about correctness. It's the front-end of the hype cycle. The tech-debt problems will come home to roost in a year or two.

fc417fc802 2y ago
> not to mention the need for better languages / runtime that give better guarantees about correctness. Use LLM to write Haskell. Problem solved?
AlexandrB 2y ago
> I think there will still be room for "debugging AI slop-code" and "performance-turning AI slop-code" Ah yes, maintenance, the most fun and satisfying part of the job. /s
- WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
  Congrats, you’ve been promoted to be the cost center. And sloppers will get to the top by cranking out features you will need to maintain.
  - popularonion 2y ago
    > slopper new 2025 slang just dropped
    - bobnamob 2y ago
      Just wait till 'slopper' starts getting classified as a slur
      - WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
        "Slopper" maybe not, but "slophead"...

philistine 2y ago

> AI will never produce a deletion. That, right here, is a world-shaking statement. Bravo.

QuadrupleA 2y ago
Not quite true though - I've occasionally passed a codebase to DeepSeek to have it simplify, and it does a decent job. Can even "code golf" if you ask it. But the sentiment is true, by default current LLMs produce verbose, overcomplicated code
esafak 2y ago
Today's assistants can refactor, which includes deletions.
- furyofantares 2y ago
  They can do something that looks a lot like refactoring but they suck extremely hard at it, if it's of any considerable size at all.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    Which is just moving the goalposts, considering that we started at "AI will never..." You can't win an argument with people who don't care if they're wrong, and someone who begins a sentence that way falls into that category.
    - furyofantares 2y ago
      The guy who said "AI will never" is obviously wrong. So is the guy who replied that they already can. I'm not moving the goalposts to point out that this is also wrong.
Eliezer 2y ago
And if it isn't already false it will be false in 6 months, or 1.5 years on the outside. AI is a moving target, and the oldest people among you might remember a time in the 1750s when it didn't talk to you about code at all.

rqtwteye 2y ago

You have to go lower down the stack. Don't use AI but write the AI. For the foreseeable future there is a lot of opportunity to make the AI faster. I am sure assembly programmers were horrified at the code the first C compilers produced. And I personally am horrified by the inefficiency of python compared to the C++ code I used to write. We always have traded faster development for inefficiency.

kmeisthax 2y ago
C solved the horrible machine code problem by inflicting programmers with the concept of undefined behavior, where blunt instruments called optimizers take a machete to your code. There's a very expensive document locked up somewhere in the ISO vault that tells you what you can and can't write in C, and if you break any of those rules the compiler is free to write whatever it wants. This created a league of incredibly elitist[0] programmers who, having mastered what they thought was the rules of C, insisted to everyone else that the real problem was you not understanding C, not the fact that C had made itself a nightmare to program in. C is bad soil to plant a project in even if you know where the poison is and how to avoid it. The inefficiency of Python[1] is downstream of a trauma response to C and all the many, many ways to shoot yourself in the foot with it. Garbage collection and bytecode are tithes paid to absolve oneself of the sins of C. It's not a matter of Python being "faster to write, harder to execute" as much as Python being used as a defense mechanism. In contrast, the trade-off from AI is unclear, aside from the fact that you didn't spend time writing it, and thus aren't learning anything from it. It's one thing to sacrifice performance for stability; versus sacrificing efficiency and understanding for faster code churn. I don't think the latter is a good tradeoff! That's how we got under-baked and developer-hostile ecosystems like C to begin with! [0] The opposite of a "DEI hire" is an "APE hire", where APE stands for "Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion" [1] I'm using Python as a stand-in for any memory-safe programming language that makes use of a bytecode interpreter that manipulates runtime-managed memory objects.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Why was bytecode needed to absolve ourselves of the sins of C?

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

If the company values that 10x speedup, there is absolutely still a place for you in this environment. Only now it's going to take five days instead of two, because it's going to be harder to track that down in the less-well-structured stuff that AI produces.

Leynos 2y ago
Why are you letting the AI construct poorly structured code? You should be discussing an architectural plan with it first and only signing off on the code design when you are comfortable with it.

candiddevmike 2y ago

I wonder what the impact of LLM codegen will have on open source projects like Kubernetes and Linux.

bluefirebrand 2y ago
I haven't really seen what Linus thinks of LLMs but I'm curious I suspect he is pretty unimpressed by the code that LLMs produce given his history with code he thinks is subpar, but what do I know
- fifilura 2y ago
  Not really. https://blog.mathieuacher.com/LinusTorvaldsLLM/ https://blog.mathieuacher.com/LinusTorvaldsLLM/

ajjenkins 2y ago

AI can definitely produce a deletion. In fact, I commonly use AI to do this. Copy some code and prompt the AI to make the code simpler or more concise. The output will usually be fewer lines of code. Unless you meant that AI won’t remove entire features from the code. But AI can do that too if you prompt it to. I think the bigger issue is that companies don’t put enough value on removing things and only focus on adding new features. That’s not a problem with AI though.

ryandrake 2y ago
I messed around with Copilot for a while and this is one of the things that actually really impressed me. It was very good at taking a messy block of code, and simplifying it by removing unnecessary stuff, sometimes reducing it to a one line lambda. Very helpful!
- buggy6257 2y ago
  > sometimes reducing it to a one line lambda. Please don't do this :) Readable code is better than clever code!
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    Especially "clever" code that is AI generated! At least with human-written clever code you can trust that somebody understood it at one point but the idea of trusting AI generated code that is "clever" makes my skin crawl
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      Also, the ways in which a (sane) human will screw-up tend to follow internal logic that other humans have learned to predict, recognize, or understand.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Most devs I've worked with are sane, unfortunately the rare exceptions were not easy to predict or understand.

stuckinhell 2y ago

AI can do deletions and refactors, and 10x speedups. You just need to push the latest models constantly.

DeathArrow 2y ago

>AI use makes the metric for success speed-to-production Wasn't it like that always for most companies? Get to market fast, add features fast, sell them, add more features?

AdieuToLogic 2y ago
>>AI use makes the metric for success speed-to-production > Wasn't it like that always for most companies? Get to market fast, add features fast, sell them, add more features? This reminds me of an old software engineering adage. When delivering a system, there are three choices stakeholders have: You can have it fast, You can have it cheap, You can have it correct. Pick any two.

762236 2y ago

AI writes my unit tests. I clean them up a bit to ensure I've gone over every line of code. But it is nice to speed through the boring parts, and without bringing declarative constructs into play (imperative coding is how most of us think).

gitpusher 2y ago

> I wonder what will make the AI developers feel old… When they look at the calendar and it says May 2025 instead of April

8note 2y ago

> AI will never produce a deletion. I'm currently reading an LLM generated deletion. its hard to get an LLM to work with existing tools, but not impossible

bitwize 2y ago

If you've ever had to work alongside someone who has, or whose job it is to obtain, all the money... you will find that time to market is very often the ONLY criterion that matters. Turning the crank to churn out some AI slop is well worth it if it means having something to go live with tomorrow as opposed to a month from now. LevelsIO's flight simulator sucked. But his payoff-to-effort ratio is so absurdly high, as a business type you have to be brain-dead to leave money on the table by refusing to try replicating his success.

bookman117 2y ago
It feels like LLMs are doing to coding what the internet/attention economy did to journalism.
- bitwize 2y ago
  Yeah, future math professors explaining the Prisoners' Dilemma are going to use clickbait journalism and AI slop as examples instead of today's canonical ones, like steroid use among athletes.

KurSix 2y ago

You're describing the kind of developer who builds foundations, not just features. And yeah, that kind of thinking gets lost when the only thing that's measured is how fast you can ship something that looks like it works

dyauspitr 2y ago

AI deletes a lot of you tell it to optimize code and the new code will pass all the tests…

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cies 2y ago

> I wonder what will make the AI developers feel old… They will not feel old because they will enter into bliss of Singularity(TM). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

kkukshtel 2y ago

Claude Code removed an npm package (and its tree of deps) from my project and wrote its own more simple component that did the core part of what I needed the package to do. I think we'll be okay and likely better off.

rolandog 2y ago

Wholeheartedly agree. I also feel like I'm sometimes reliving the King Neptune vs Spongebob meme equivalent of coding. No room for Think, Plan, Execute... Only throw spaghetti code at wall.