4 ms·

Perhaps the issue is you were used to writing 200k lines of code. Most engineers would be agast at that. Lines of code is a debit not a credit

rootnod3 1y ago
In that case, LLMs are full on debt-machines.
- threecheese 1y ago
  Ones that can remediate it though. If I am capable of safely refactoring 1,000 copies of a method, in a codebase that humans don’t look at, did it really matter if the workload functions as designed?
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    In a type safe language like C# or Java, why could you need an LLM for that? it’s a standard guaranteed safe (as long as you aren’t using reflection) refactor with ReSharper.
  - sdenton4 1y ago
    Jeebus, 'safely' is carrying a hell of a lot of water there...
  - uoaei 1y ago
    Features present in all IDEs over the last 5 years or so are better and more verifiably correct for this task than probabilistic text generators.
Deestan 1y ago
I am now making an emotional reaction based on zero knowledge of the B2B codebase's environment, but to be honest I think it is relevant to the discussion on why people are "worlds apart". 200k lines of code is a failure state. At this point you have lost control and can only make changes to the codebase through immense effort, and not at a tolerable pace. Agentic code writers are good at giving you this size of mess and at helping to shovel stuff around to make changes that are hard for humans due to the unusable state of the codebase. If overgrown barely manageble codebases are all a person's ever known and they think it's normal that changes are hard and time-consuming and needing reams of code, I understand that they believe AI agents are useful as code writers. I think they do not have the foundation to tell mediocre from good code. I am extremely aware of the judgemental hubris of this comment. I'd not normally huff my own farts in public this obnoxiously, but I honestly feel it is useful for the "AI hater vs AI sucker" discussion to be honest about this type of emotion.
- mind-blight 1y ago
  It really depends on what your use case is. E.g. of you're dealing with a lot of legacy integrations, dealing with all the edge cases can require a lot of code that you can't refactor away through cleverness. Each integration is hopefully only a few thousand lines of code, but if you have 50 integrations you can easily break 100k loc just dealing with those. They just need to be encapsulated well so that the integration cruft is isolated from the core business logic, and they become relatively simple to reason about
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  I agree on principle, and I'm sure many of us know how much of a pain it is to work on million or even billion dollar codebases, where even small changes can be weeks of beauracracy and hours of meetings. But with the way the industry is, I'm also not remotely surprised. We have people come and go as they are poached, burned out, or simply life circumstances. The training for the new people isn't the best, and the documentation for any but the large companies are probably a mess. We also don't tend to encourage periods to focus on properly addressing tech debt, but focusing on delivering features. I don't know how such an environment over years, decades doesn't generate so much redundant, clashing, and quirky interactions. The culture doesn't allow much alternative. And of course, I hope even the most devout AI evangelists realize that AI will only multiply this culture. Code that no one may even truly understand, but "it works". I don't know if even Silicon Valley (2014) could have made a parody more shocking than the reality this will yield.
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  200k loc is not a failure state. suppose your b2b saas has 5 user types and 5 downstream SAASes it connects to, thats 20k loc per major programming unit. not so bad.
  - krainboltgreene 1y ago
    That's actually insane.
- bubblyworld 1y ago
rahimnathwani 1y ago
Lines of code is a debit not a credit Perhaps you meant this the other way around. A credit entry indicates an increase in the amount you owe.
- bmurphy1976 1y ago
  It's a terrible analogy either way. It should be each extra line of code beyond the bare minimum is a liability.
- malfist 1y ago
  You are absolutely correct, I am not a finance wizard
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    Liability vs asset is what you were trying to say, I think, but everyone says that, so to be charitable I think you were trying to put a new spin on the phrasing, which I think is admirable, to your credit.
d0mine 1y ago
You might have meant "code is a liability not an asset"

rootnod3 1y ago

In that case, LLMs are full on debt-machines.

threecheese 1y ago
Ones that can remediate it though. If I am capable of safely refactoring 1,000 copies of a method, in a codebase that humans don’t look at, did it really matter if the workload functions as designed?
- JustExAWS 1y ago
  In a type safe language like C# or Java, why could you need an LLM for that? it’s a standard guaranteed safe (as long as you aren’t using reflection) refactor with ReSharper.
- sdenton4 1y ago
  Jeebus, 'safely' is carrying a hell of a lot of water there...
- uoaei 1y ago
  Features present in all IDEs over the last 5 years or so are better and more verifiably correct for this task than probabilistic text generators.

Deestan 1y ago

I am now making an emotional reaction based on zero knowledge of the B2B codebase's environment, but to be honest I think it is relevant to the discussion on why people are "worlds apart". 200k lines of code is a failure state. At this point you have lost control and can only make changes to the codebase through immense effort, and not at a tolerable pace. Agentic code writers are good at giving you this size of mess and at helping to shovel stuff around to make changes that are hard for humans due to the unusable state of the codebase. If overgrown barely manageble codebases are all a person's ever known and they think it's normal that changes are hard and time-consuming and needing reams of code, I understand that they believe AI agents are useful as code writers. I think they do not have the foundation to tell mediocre from good code. I am extremely aware of the judgemental hubris of this comment. I'd not normally huff my own farts in public this obnoxiously, but I honestly feel it is useful for the "AI hater vs AI sucker" discussion to be honest about this type of emotion.

mind-blight 1y ago
It really depends on what your use case is. E.g. of you're dealing with a lot of legacy integrations, dealing with all the edge cases can require a lot of code that you can't refactor away through cleverness. Each integration is hopefully only a few thousand lines of code, but if you have 50 integrations you can easily break 100k loc just dealing with those. They just need to be encapsulated well so that the integration cruft is isolated from the core business logic, and they become relatively simple to reason about
johnnyanmac 1y ago
I agree on principle, and I'm sure many of us know how much of a pain it is to work on million or even billion dollar codebases, where even small changes can be weeks of beauracracy and hours of meetings. But with the way the industry is, I'm also not remotely surprised. We have people come and go as they are poached, burned out, or simply life circumstances. The training for the new people isn't the best, and the documentation for any but the large companies are probably a mess. We also don't tend to encourage periods to focus on properly addressing tech debt, but focusing on delivering features. I don't know how such an environment over years, decades doesn't generate so much redundant, clashing, and quirky interactions. The culture doesn't allow much alternative. And of course, I hope even the most devout AI evangelists realize that AI will only multiply this culture. Code that no one may even truly understand, but "it works". I don't know if even Silicon Valley (2014) could have made a parody more shocking than the reality this will yield.
throwawaymaths 1y ago
200k loc is not a failure state. suppose your b2b saas has 5 user types and 5 downstream SAASes it connects to, thats 20k loc per major programming unit. not so bad.
- krainboltgreene 1y ago
  That's actually insane.
bubblyworld 1y ago

rahimnathwani 1y ago

Lines of code is a debit not a credit Perhaps you meant this the other way around. A credit entry indicates an increase in the amount you owe.

bmurphy1976 1y ago
It's a terrible analogy either way. It should be each extra line of code beyond the bare minimum is a liability.
malfist 1y ago
You are absolutely correct, I am not a finance wizard
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  Liability vs asset is what you were trying to say, I think, but everyone says that, so to be charitable I think you were trying to put a new spin on the phrasing, which I think is admirable, to your credit.

d0mine 1y ago

You might have meant "code is a liability not an asset"