4 ms·
By then, the fix will be easy. Fire up the latest LLM, point it at your codebase and tell it "rewrite this from scratch. do it well. fix the architecture mistak
by ativzzz 5mo ago
By then, the fix will be easy. Fire up the latest LLM, point it at your codebase and tell it "rewrite this from scratch. do it well. fix the architecture mistakes"
- kurthr 5mo ago"Write me a really cool game, that will make me lots of money, fast!"
- KumaBear 5mo agoMake me a 1hr episode of my favorite book. Make it as lore accurate as possible. Plot out the script for the next 100 episodes.
- estimator7292 5mo agoI see your point, however: EA sports has been doing this for literally the entire lifetime of gaming as an industry
- DonHopkins 5mo agoElectronic Sharts slogans and franchises: "Shit's in the Game!" "Chunder Everything" "Maddening NFL 26" "FIFiAsco 26" "UFC 26 (Un Finished Code)" "The Shits 4" "Battlefailed" "Need for Greed"
- mlvljr 5mo ago[dead]
- fnoef 5mo ago"Make sure to double check everything, and MAKE NO MISTAKES!!!"
- bhagyeshsp 5mo ago"YOU'RE A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER!!!"
- ryandrake 5mo ago"Ultrathink!"
- unfunco 5mo agoDon't hallucinate!
- bulbar 5mo agoWill work just as good as today or 20 years ago.
- cortesoft 5mo agoAre you suggesting AI coding was as good 20 years ago as it is today?
- hrldcpr 5mo agoI think they're being sarcastic, saying that rewrites from scratch have rarely worked well (whether done by AI or humans).
- bulbar 5mo agoExactly. Sorry for not being explicit about it. I thought it was clear enough, because 'this code is crap, let's just rewrite the whole thing, doesn't look to hard' is kind of famous for being a bad idea most of the time since forever.
- vrganj 5mo agoIt sure wrote less crappy code.
- hasbot 5mo agoWe can do this today too (but definitely hopefully future LLMs make better architectural decisions). With Claude, I've been working on an application for the last 2 months. I didn't have a great vision of what I wanted when I started but I didn't want that to slow me down. The architecture is terrible - Claude separated some functionality into different classes but did a bad job at it and created a big ball of mud. Now that I finally have my vision locked down and implemented (albeit poorly), it'd be a great time to throw it away and start over. It'd be interesting to see the result and see how long it takes.
- ativzzz 5mo agoJust have claude (or gpt maybe) do an architecture review and request a multi-phase refactoring plan. This is probably better to do incrementally as you notice the balls of mud forming but it might not be too late. Either way, if it does something you don't like, `git checkout` and start over
- faizshah 5mo agoIt won't be an LLM that does it, the entire feature of an LLM is it produces generalizable reasonably "correct" text in response to a context. The system that makes it have an opinion about good vs bad architecture or engineering sensibilities will be something on top of the transformer and probably something more deterministic than a prompt.
- orphea 5mo agoDo you think new LLMs are going to write better and better code? When all they are going to have is the slop generated by previous, worse models?
- chickensong 5mo agoYes. The models may have started from indiscriminate scraping, but people are undoubtedly working on refining the training data. Combined with the overall model capabilities, I suspect code quality will continue to go up. What you're suggesting is a negative flywheel where quality spirals down, but I'm hoping it becomes a positive loop and the quality floor goes up. We had plenty of slop before LLMs, and not all LLM output is slop. Time will tell, but I think LLMs will continue to improve their coding abilities and push overall quality higher.
- orphea 5mo agoLet's agree to disagree. What I see is that while LLMs can do real tasks, they often produce overengineered unmaintainable slop (plenty of examples where code can be reduced 10x to do the same). I hope this is not a base to continue training LLMs on.
- chickensong 5mo agoI don't disagree that there's a lot of slop getting churned out, you're not wrong there. I just have hopes that we'll course-correct after some initial adjustment period, but I have no idea how long that might be (guessing several years). I don't know how long LLMs will hold their position, but in my mind, it makes sense that computers will eventually be the best programmers. Humans will still guide, but rarely write or even read code. I might be dead by then, but that's my prediction for the future.
- jcalx 5mo agoThere is definitely going to be some Wirth's law-like [0] effect about the asymmetry of software complexity outpacing LLMs' abilities to untangle said software. Claude 9.2 Optimus Prime might be able to wrangle 1M LoC, but somehow YC 2035 will have some Series A startup with 1B+ LoC in prod — we'll always have software companies teetering on the very edge of unmaintainability. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- AlotOfReading 5mo agoIt's the Peter principle for computers. Codebases expand to the limits of the organization's ability to manage them. If you make one person use ed to write code for a bare metal environment, you'll get a comparatively small, laser-focused codebase. If you task a hundred modern developers to solve the same problem, you'll get a Linux box device running a million lines of JavaScript. Same thing happens in other fields. A rich country and a poor country might build equivalent roads, but they won't pay the same price for them.