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There you go arguing with strawmen again. I don’t give a single flying flip about SOLID, or Clean Code, or GoF. People who read Clean Code as their first progra

There you go arguing with strawmen again. I don’t give a single flying flip about SOLID, or Clean Code, or GoF. People who read Clean Code as their first programming but and made that their identity have been the bane of my existence as a programmer. It’s not about how long something is taking although that is an observable behavior. It’s about how 1 million users over time will develop ways of using your product that you never thought about, much less documented or tested. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “The purpose of the system is what it does”? The system is the not the spec or the tests. An agent is only reasoning about how to add a new feature, and the only thing preventing from changing observable behavior is the tests. So if an agent is changing untested behavior it’s changing the purpose of the system.

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
Thats not exactly a great argument depending on undefined behavior. Should I as a developer depend on “undefined behavior” in C (yes undefined behavior is explicitly defined in C)? On a user facing note, I did a project where I threw stats in DDB just for my own observation knowing very well that was the worse database to use since it does no aggregation type queries (sum, average, etc). I didn’t document it, I didn’t talk about it and yet the developer on their side used it when I specifically documented that he should subscribe to the SNS topic that I emit events to and ingest the data to his own Oracle database. No library maintainer for instance of C# or Java library is going to promise that private functions that a developer got access to via reflection is not going to change. I’m solely responsible for public documented interfaces and behaviors. Oh and that gets back to an earlier point, how do I know that my systems will be able to be maintained? For the most part I design my systems to do a “thing” with clearly defined entry points and extension points and exit points and interfaces. In the case I’m referring to above - it was a search system that was based on “agents” some RAG based, one using a Postgres database with a similarity search, and an orchestrator. You extend the system by adding a new lambda and registering it and prioritizing results if the agent with my vibe coded GUI. Apple is famous for instance for not caring if you tried to use private APIs and it broke in a new version.
- sarchertech 7mo ago
  >UB This is a topic I happen to know a little about. You as a programmer should probably avoid UB for the most part, but the key point here is that programmers don’t follow this rule. A while back a study found that SQLite, PostgreSQL, GCC, LLVM, Python, OpenSSL, Firefox all contained code that relied on unsigned overflow. Basically even though the C spec says it’s UB, almost every CPU you’ll run into uses twos compliment so it naturally wraps around. When compiler authors tried to aggressively optimize and broke everything they had to roll that back and/or release flags to allow users to continue using the old behavior. This kind of stuff happens all the time. The C spec is nearly worthless paper because what matters is what the compilers implement not what the spec tells them to implement. If you spend time talking to LLVM folks, breaking the world because they changed some unspecified behavior is one of their top concerns. And this is programmers who know how to read specs. Imagine you’re working on software used by nearly ever major movie studio. You think those users have ever read the spec for the software they are using? They don’t care about UB, they don’t even know the concept exists. It doesn’t matter how well tested I think my software is. Even very simple software will have unspecified and untested behavior. You give the software a little time and some users and they will start exploiting that behavior. It I unleashed some agents on our code base to implement well architected features, without reviewing their output, and could somehow magically ensure that they didn’t break any workflow that we had documented, tested, or that was even known about to our organization, the head of NBCUniversal would be on the phone with my bosses bosses bosses boss demanding we change it back to the way it was within 24 hours. Users depend on what the system does, not what you as a designer think it does. The purpose of a system is what it does. Not what it says it does. We’ve been having this argument since the waterfall days. The code is the spec. We aren’t architects drawing blueprints. The code is the blueprint. If it was that easy to design systems like this all code would already be generated from UML graphs and flowcharts like we’ve been able to do for decades.
  - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    Back in my C days, I wrote C code that had to work on PCs that I had access to and mainframes that I never got a chance to test on on ancient compilers. Some little endian and some big endian. We had a custom make file that tried to warn against non portable behavior. But are you really arguing that I shouldn’t feel free to change private methods because some developer somewhere might use reflection to access it or I shouldn’t change the schema of Sqllite database that is deeply embedded in library folder somewhere? Or are you saying I should feel free to do char foo() { char bar = “hello world”; return bar; } and be upset when weird things happen when I upgrade my compiler? What do you think Apple would do in that situation? They have multiple times over the past 3 decades said tough noogies if you didn’t do things using the documented APIs. Jeff Bezos mandated documented interfaces and the “API mandate” in 2002z

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago

Thats not exactly a great argument depending on undefined behavior. Should I as a developer depend on “undefined behavior” in C (yes undefined behavior is explicitly defined in C)? On a user facing note, I did a project where I threw stats in DDB just for my own observation knowing very well that was the worse database to use since it does no aggregation type queries (sum, average, etc). I didn’t document it, I didn’t talk about it and yet the developer on their side used it when I specifically documented that he should subscribe to the SNS topic that I emit events to and ingest the data to his own Oracle database. No library maintainer for instance of C# or Java library is going to promise that private functions that a developer got access to via reflection is not going to change. I’m solely responsible for public documented interfaces and behaviors. Oh and that gets back to an earlier point, how do I know that my systems will be able to be maintained? For the most part I design my systems to do a “thing” with clearly defined entry points and extension points and exit points and interfaces. In the case I’m referring to above - it was a search system that was based on “agents” some RAG based, one using a Postgres database with a similarity search, and an orchestrator. You extend the system by adding a new lambda and registering it and prioritizing results if the agent with my vibe coded GUI. Apple is famous for instance for not caring if you tried to use private APIs and it broke in a new version.

sarchertech 7mo ago
>UB This is a topic I happen to know a little about. You as a programmer should probably avoid UB for the most part, but the key point here is that programmers don’t follow this rule. A while back a study found that SQLite, PostgreSQL, GCC, LLVM, Python, OpenSSL, Firefox all contained code that relied on unsigned overflow. Basically even though the C spec says it’s UB, almost every CPU you’ll run into uses twos compliment so it naturally wraps around. When compiler authors tried to aggressively optimize and broke everything they had to roll that back and/or release flags to allow users to continue using the old behavior. This kind of stuff happens all the time. The C spec is nearly worthless paper because what matters is what the compilers implement not what the spec tells them to implement. If you spend time talking to LLVM folks, breaking the world because they changed some unspecified behavior is one of their top concerns. And this is programmers who know how to read specs. Imagine you’re working on software used by nearly ever major movie studio. You think those users have ever read the spec for the software they are using? They don’t care about UB, they don’t even know the concept exists. It doesn’t matter how well tested I think my software is. Even very simple software will have unspecified and untested behavior. You give the software a little time and some users and they will start exploiting that behavior. It I unleashed some agents on our code base to implement well architected features, without reviewing their output, and could somehow magically ensure that they didn’t break any workflow that we had documented, tested, or that was even known about to our organization, the head of NBCUniversal would be on the phone with my bosses bosses bosses boss demanding we change it back to the way it was within 24 hours. Users depend on what the system does, not what you as a designer think it does. The purpose of a system is what it does. Not what it says it does. We’ve been having this argument since the waterfall days. The code is the spec. We aren’t architects drawing blueprints. The code is the blueprint. If it was that easy to design systems like this all code would already be generated from UML graphs and flowcharts like we’ve been able to do for decades.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  Back in my C days, I wrote C code that had to work on PCs that I had access to and mainframes that I never got a chance to test on on ancient compilers. Some little endian and some big endian. We had a custom make file that tried to warn against non portable behavior. But are you really arguing that I shouldn’t feel free to change private methods because some developer somewhere might use reflection to access it or I shouldn’t change the schema of Sqllite database that is deeply embedded in library folder somewhere? Or are you saying I should feel free to do char foo() { char bar = “hello world”; return bar; } and be upset when weird things happen when I upgrade my compiler? What do you think Apple would do in that situation? They have multiple times over the past 3 decades said tough noogies if you didn’t do things using the documented APIs. Jeff Bezos mandated documented interfaces and the “API mandate” in 2002z