4 ms·
“The only people I've heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don't read it.” Are you sure these people aren’t busy working rather than chatting?
by benguild 5mo ago
“The only people I've heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don't read it.” Are you sure these people aren’t busy working rather than chatting? (haha)
But in all seriousness it depends on what you’re doing with it. Writing a quick tool using an LLM is much easier than context changing to write it yourself. If you need the tool, that’s very valuable.
- sevenzero 5mo agoAlso as a webdev, it writes basic CRUD pretty good. I am tired of having to build forms myself and the LLMs are usually really good at that. Been building a new app with lots of policies and whatnot and instructing a LLM is just much faster than doing the same repetitive shit over and over myself.
- spockz 5mo agoIf you were tired of writing forms yourself, had you looked at https://jsonforms.io/ https://jsonforms.io/? Just specify the the data you need, or extract it from the api spec and go. Display the form uniformly every time across your site. No need to burn AI time.
- sevenzero 5mo agoI typically avoid any most abstractions or third party dependencies. Yea it could be neat, but I still need a lot of custom logic here and there. Same reason I avoid stuff like GraphQL. A little update: upon viewing the page on phone, for me the "comitter" field in the demo is going out of bounds... Really not speaking for their product.
- topaz0 5mo agoSounds like you're just fine depending on an extremely imprecise abstraction (natural language) and an extremely opaque third party (anthropic).
- sevenzero 5mo agoI can also just do it myself though lmao its not like I dont look at what it is producing The recommended tool cant even produce mobile friendly, like why would I ever use it?
- topaz0 5mo agoI don't know or care about that specific tool, or really what you do at all, I was just reacting to how the principle you stated conflicts with the practice you described. How you reconcile those is up to you.
- abustamam 5mo agoI think you're missing the point of the commenter. A third party library is a new dependency. Since there's new vulnerabilities almost every week in the npm ecosystem, if you can do something without a third party, it's probably better. With LLM driven code you can generate code once, and then if anything is shitty about it you can always manually update it yourself without the need of an LLM. It's a dependency of convenience, not an app-dependency.
- topaz0 5mo agoFrom the description of the recommended tool it sounded to me like something that you use to deterministically generate code from a spec, which you could then modify if you like. That would be the same kind of dependency as the LLM workflow you describe, except that the abstraction is well-defined in a way that the LLM is not. Whether it's good or not is a different question.
- abustamam 5mo agoThat would be nice if it were the case but from what I can gather from this interesting dependency graph, there's a hard dependency on its renderer and schema. https://jsonforms.io/img/architecture.svg https://jsonforms.io/img/architecture.svg You can add your custom renderer but you still need their library for bindings and such.
- hansmayer 5mo ago> I typically avoid any most abstractions or third party dependencies Right, so depending on an LLM makes perfect sense in that case, thanks for clarifying :)
- sevenzero 5mo ago[flagged]
- hansmayer 5mo agoMate, that's literally what you implied, innit? You probably "can" do it yourself, but you choose not to - I wonder why? Also the point of sarcasm is to communicate it in such way that it is obvious, without using the "/s" signifier. You know like, telling a joke at a party that you don't have to explain.
- sevenzero 5mo ago> I wonder why? Because I like to save time?
- bluefirebrand 5mo agoAvoiding abstractions "because I like to save time" doesn't sound like something a professional software engineer should ever say
- sevenzero 5mo agoYea because having 200 different abstractions and DSLs makes stuff easier for sure! Why not use all the stuff that was popular 6 years ago like Prisma, GraphQL and Redux, whoops suddenly you need a whole team of devs knowing all kinds of unecessary abstractions.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
- drbojingle 5mo agoThis might pair well with something like https://data-atlas.net https://data-atlas.net.
- manmal 5mo agoI‘ve used it in a previous engagement. Unfortunately it’s not customizable enough, and performance for deep forms is really bad. Also, I‘d definitely use agents to set it up.
- pron 5mo agoSure. I'm talking about production software that needs to survive and evolve for a long while.
- pydry 5mo agoThis the core unspoken bone of contention in most AI arguments I think: most people either arent writing code with strict quality requirements or dont realize where their use of AI is violating them. That said most of the world's most useful code has strict quality requirements. Even before AI 90% of SLOC would be tossed away without much if any use, 9% was used infrequently while 1% runs half the world's software.
- mountainriver 5mo agoCan you not review it?
- throwaway173738 5mo agoReview always misses something.
- RugnirViking 5mo agoI think this misses the scale of the problem. Review never fixed tech debt, nor did it fix relevant/bloated test suites. It didn't solve complexity, or eliminate footguns. Very few people (I would argue almost noone) had developed theories for what all of these even were, or how to spot them in code. Reviewers aren't perfect, far from it. And we just gave them ~20x more code to review. Incentives mean that taking 20x longer to review is unacceptable. So where do we go from here?
- mountainriver 5mo agoCertainly not back to hand crafted code unless you want to be left in the dust
- bigstrat2003 5mo agoYou can review it, but that negates any productivity gains from using the LLM in the first place.