4 ms·
Not in my experience. The only slapdash prose in the cycle is in the immediate output of a product development discussion. And that is inevitably too sparse t
by quesera 1y ago
Not in my experience.
The only slapdash prose in the cycle is in the immediate output of a product development discussion.
And that is inevitably too sparse to inform, without the full context of the team, company, and industry.
- akerl_ 1y agoSorry, are you saying "the only place where there's slapdash prose is right before it would be super cool to have an alpha version of the code magically appear, that we can iterate on based on the full context of the team, company, and industry"?
- quesera 1y agoNo, not at all. Alpha code with zero context is an utter waste of attention. I must be confused about how y'all are developing software, because the path from "incompletely specified takeaways from a product design meeting", and "final product" does not pass through any intermediate steps where reduced contextual awareness is valuable. Writing code is not the hard part.
- tptacek 1y agoWhere's "zero context" coming from here?
- tptacek 1y agoI didn't say anything about "slapdash".
- quesera 1y agoUmm. Yeah, I think ya did. :)
- tptacek 1y agoNo.
- quesera 1y agoYou introduced the word into the thread. I quoted you. Unless you're operating at some notational level above the literal, yes I think you did.
- tptacek 1y agoSorry, I was referring the the prompt, not the code.
- quesera 1y agoI was referring to the prompt/prose as well. The median-quality code just doesn't seem like a valuable asset en route to final product, but I guess it's a matter of process at that point. Generative AI, as I've managed to use it, brings me to a place in the software lifecycle that I don't want to be. Median-quality code that lacks the context or polish needed to be usable. Or in some cases even parseable. I may be missing essential details though. Smart people are getting more out of AI than I am. I'd love to see a Youtube/Twitch/etc video of someone who knows what they're doing demoing the build of a typical TODO app or similar, from paragraphs to product.
- tptacek 1y agoMedian-quality code is extraordinarily valuable. It is most of the load-bearing code people actually ship. What's almost certainly happening here is that you and I have differing definitions of "median-quality" commercial code. I'm pretty sure that if we triangle-tested (say) a Go project from 'jerf and Gemini 2.5 Go output for the same (substantial; say, 2,000 lines) project --- not whatever Gemini's initial spew is, but a final product where Gemini is the author of 80+% of the lines --- you would not be able to pick the human code out from the LLM code.