3 ms·

I wonder if the reception is so variable due to differing exposure to 1) infra as code and 2) engineering teams that don't produce any artifacts outside of thei

I wonder if the reception is so variable due to differing exposure to 1) infra as code and 2) engineering teams that don't produce any artifacts outside of their code. > When starting on a new codebase, how do you make yourself into a helpful contributor as quickly as possible? I go straight for the humans and their human docs. What problem was the system originally built to solve? What was the original design, and what were its biggest problems? Who is currently using it? If you know these, reading the code is much easier because you can guess why things were done the way they are. This is the way but plenty of engineering teams don't have any human docs at all. Decisions are made in one engineer's head or in a chat that isn't saved. The spec was just a few notes in a ticket that was deleted during cleanup or lost when the team changed trackers. There's no map of the codebase or features, no ADRs, minimal observability. All you have is the code. You read the code to try and figure out what is going on then ping an engineer who made a recent commit to a specific area to ask if they remember why something was done the way it was. Someone makes a change and it breaks something on the other side of the codebase that they thought was totally unrelated, etc.

sublinear 4mo ago
Talking to an LLM is often still a lower quality result than asking the lead engineer themselves or the collaborators they left behind. You're making a tradeoff between time taken and result quality. Even the most AI-positive teams prefer human discussion when things get that tough. Given enough time, things will "click" for humans. LLMs don't work that way. Even a team of all-new unfamiliar devs forced to study an old codebase will eventually figure out what it was about and pick up tons of nuance the LLM cannot. This is the nature of writing. It exists in a time and place beyond the pure literal text. Humans live in this context and can get into the headspace of the original dev(s).
- molsongolden 4mo ago
  Agreed and I think the author agrees with this too. One of the ideas is that the devs should be discussing and documenting their intent outside of the code then letting AI tools generate the code as specified. "Engineering" should occupy the time that was previously occupied by "coding" and the context and writing should exist as intentional written context, not just poorly documented code.
  - sublinear 4mo ago
    I agree that documentation should be made higher priority than "coding", but letting AI code everything is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's from this perspective that a lot of engineers feel strong negative sentiment towards AI. There are always going to be some critical sections of code that one must consider carefully. These tend to be at the extreme ends of choice. Either there's only one way to do it and it probably sucks, or there are many ways to do it and staying optimal is very slippery for maintainers. Identifying and describing these critical sections is also the most important part of the documentation. This is precisely where LLMs fail to do a good job and where people curse the original devs for not writing docs. But as well, the overall architecture is just as important. The code for this tends to look like the "boring" boilerplate. This is the skeleton of the codebase and LLMs can be bad at this too, haphazardly jamming together design patterns that clash. We're in luck that, usually, a framework or library will provide this code along with documentation to be copypasted verbatim. The rub is when the developers are having to shoehorn it onto existing code they will have to carefully craft some custom interfaces and document them very well. So in the end, what's left for the LLM to do? When it does a good job, it's usually cribbing so heavily from existing solutions by humans you could have copied it yourself if you knew where it got it from. The LLM is automating copypasta, not deliberate coding. When it's bad, it's making a mess only suitable for a rough proof of concept, if it even works. From the perspective of a diligent engineer trying to avoid technical debt and other incidents down the road, burning an extra couple of days to get it done right by hand isn't that big of a deal. LLMs become about as useful as a google search. Assuming one does not work at a coding sweatshop, why not just use the google AI summary 90% of the time? The agentic workflow doesn't look promising for a significant chunk of experienced engineers working on maintenance more often than new projects.
    - skydhash 4mo ago
      > From the perspective of a diligent engineer trying to avoid technical debt and other incidents down the road, burning an extra couple of days to get it done right by hand isn't that big of a deal. LLMs become about as useful as a google search. Assuming one does not work at a coding sweatshop, why not just use the google AI summary 90% of the time? If there's one thing that seems unclear from AI proponents, that is the number of technology they're using at the same time. After months or so on a project there should be enough that should be in longterm memory or resources that are part of your browser history that things that require deep research should be a small part of each ticket. And it would be important enough to get it right.
- theshrike79 4mo ago
  "Asking the lead engineer" doesn't scale though. Writing shit down does. So if your whole process is "just ask the lead eng" and you keep hiring new people, everyone keeps asking the lead and the lead quits beause nobody wants to do that. If you write shit down, the new hires can ask your company internal AI system that has access to all of the docs and get the answer - with direct links to official decision documents telling the "why". At the very least the lead engineer should write the answers down every time they're asked something and reply with RTFM after that =)
LtWorf 4mo ago
You guys get tickets that tell you what to do in detail?

sublinear 4mo ago

Talking to an LLM is often still a lower quality result than asking the lead engineer themselves or the collaborators they left behind. You're making a tradeoff between time taken and result quality. Even the most AI-positive teams prefer human discussion when things get that tough. Given enough time, things will "click" for humans. LLMs don't work that way. Even a team of all-new unfamiliar devs forced to study an old codebase will eventually figure out what it was about and pick up tons of nuance the LLM cannot. This is the nature of writing. It exists in a time and place beyond the pure literal text. Humans live in this context and can get into the headspace of the original dev(s).

molsongolden 4mo ago
Agreed and I think the author agrees with this too. One of the ideas is that the devs should be discussing and documenting their intent outside of the code then letting AI tools generate the code as specified. "Engineering" should occupy the time that was previously occupied by "coding" and the context and writing should exist as intentional written context, not just poorly documented code.
- sublinear 4mo ago
  I agree that documentation should be made higher priority than "coding", but letting AI code everything is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's from this perspective that a lot of engineers feel strong negative sentiment towards AI. There are always going to be some critical sections of code that one must consider carefully. These tend to be at the extreme ends of choice. Either there's only one way to do it and it probably sucks, or there are many ways to do it and staying optimal is very slippery for maintainers. Identifying and describing these critical sections is also the most important part of the documentation. This is precisely where LLMs fail to do a good job and where people curse the original devs for not writing docs. But as well, the overall architecture is just as important. The code for this tends to look like the "boring" boilerplate. This is the skeleton of the codebase and LLMs can be bad at this too, haphazardly jamming together design patterns that clash. We're in luck that, usually, a framework or library will provide this code along with documentation to be copypasted verbatim. The rub is when the developers are having to shoehorn it onto existing code they will have to carefully craft some custom interfaces and document them very well. So in the end, what's left for the LLM to do? When it does a good job, it's usually cribbing so heavily from existing solutions by humans you could have copied it yourself if you knew where it got it from. The LLM is automating copypasta, not deliberate coding. When it's bad, it's making a mess only suitable for a rough proof of concept, if it even works. From the perspective of a diligent engineer trying to avoid technical debt and other incidents down the road, burning an extra couple of days to get it done right by hand isn't that big of a deal. LLMs become about as useful as a google search. Assuming one does not work at a coding sweatshop, why not just use the google AI summary 90% of the time? The agentic workflow doesn't look promising for a significant chunk of experienced engineers working on maintenance more often than new projects.
  - skydhash 4mo ago
    > From the perspective of a diligent engineer trying to avoid technical debt and other incidents down the road, burning an extra couple of days to get it done right by hand isn't that big of a deal. LLMs become about as useful as a google search. Assuming one does not work at a coding sweatshop, why not just use the google AI summary 90% of the time? If there's one thing that seems unclear from AI proponents, that is the number of technology they're using at the same time. After months or so on a project there should be enough that should be in longterm memory or resources that are part of your browser history that things that require deep research should be a small part of each ticket. And it would be important enough to get it right.
theshrike79 4mo ago
"Asking the lead engineer" doesn't scale though. Writing shit down does. So if your whole process is "just ask the lead eng" and you keep hiring new people, everyone keeps asking the lead and the lead quits beause nobody wants to do that. If you write shit down, the new hires can ask your company internal AI system that has access to all of the docs and get the answer - with direct links to official decision documents telling the "why". At the very least the lead engineer should write the answers down every time they're asked something and reply with RTFM after that =)

LtWorf 4mo ago

You guys get tickets that tell you what to do in detail?