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We have a tool at work that was entirely spun out of a prototype that itself was entirely driven by a single guy with an unlimited Claude budget. I only touch i

by scruple 1mo ago

We have a tool at work that was entirely spun out of a prototype that itself was entirely driven by a single guy with an unlimited Claude budget. I only touch it on the edges, where I need to integrate it every so slightly into one of my systems. It's a crucial piece of software for the team, though. I've looked over the source, the thing that strikes me the most is the verbosity. Human software engineers would've been much more terse, so the thing has a fucking lot of code that's doing very little. They're trying to deal with that now, while also driving feature requests forward, and from the distance it looks like an unmanageable shit show.

danbolt 1mo ago
I sometimes wonder if the verbosity gives the LLM more “margin for error” when generating text that passes requirements.
- glouwbug 1mo ago
  10 lines of checks per line of actual execution. Anxiety for their stable pay
  - vanattab 29d ago
    Of course. Those 10 lines of extra code is that much more tokens every time your agents read and use that section of code. The more blot in the project to more tokens your agents will burn.
    - glouwbug 29d ago
      Reminds me of a subcontracting agency
- escapecharacter 1mo ago
  It's simpler. The verbosity, the line of code count, is what has gotten people excited about it. So everyone optimizes for verbosity.
  - anthonyrstevens 27d ago
    This does not strike me as true at all. Nobody's crowing about the verbosity of their AI-generated code. Rather, it seems to me they're impressed by the functionality or capabilities relative to time/cost.
franciscop 29d ago
It really depends on the codebase. I remember ~10 years ago trying to learn about some of the big codebases that existed and what struke me was the verbosity. I don't remember if it was a PHP framework or a big JS library, but it was like 20+ lines of comment/explanation for each line of code. I was trying to follow the code flow and it was basically impossible, you could fit like 2-5 lines of actual code per screen.
cromka 28d ago
In all fairness, LLMs try to write the code with all the safeguards imaginable, all exceptions handled and following the SDK/language/framework guidelines. So a lot of this verbosity is good, even if we aren't used to it, because almost no one writes their code so exhaustively.

by scruple 1mo ago

danbolt 1mo ago

I sometimes wonder if the verbosity gives the LLM more “margin for error” when generating text that passes requirements.

glouwbug 1mo ago
10 lines of checks per line of actual execution. Anxiety for their stable pay
- vanattab 29d ago
  Of course. Those 10 lines of extra code is that much more tokens every time your agents read and use that section of code. The more blot in the project to more tokens your agents will burn.
  - glouwbug 29d ago
    Reminds me of a subcontracting agency
escapecharacter 1mo ago
It's simpler. The verbosity, the line of code count, is what has gotten people excited about it. So everyone optimizes for verbosity.
- anthonyrstevens 27d ago
  This does not strike me as true at all. Nobody's crowing about the verbosity of their AI-generated code. Rather, it seems to me they're impressed by the functionality or capabilities relative to time/cost.

franciscop 29d ago

It really depends on the codebase. I remember ~10 years ago trying to learn about some of the big codebases that existed and what struke me was the verbosity. I don't remember if it was a PHP framework or a big JS library, but it was like 20+ lines of comment/explanation for each line of code. I was trying to follow the code flow and it was basically impossible, you could fit like 2-5 lines of actual code per screen.

cromka 28d ago

In all fairness, LLMs try to write the code with all the safeguards imaginable, all exceptions handled and following the SDK/language/framework guidelines. So a lot of this verbosity is good, even if we aren't used to it, because almost no one writes their code so exhaustively.