4 ms·

Well, my way of thinking about it is basically that I did not spend my life shiting on over-engineered-bloated-Golberg-machine source code written by so-called

Well, my way of thinking about it is basically that I did not spend my life shiting on over-engineered-bloated-Golberg-machine source code written by so-called programmers to finish my life asking agents to generate these same stuff 10x faster. I love code, you don't, fine. So be it.

bigupthewhole 28d ago
While this was true 1+ years ago, the agents don't write bad code anymore. They might not write according to your preferences, but you can also have it adjust to your style. Also, humans didn't evolve to write or read code, even the best programmers are terrible at it from an objective point of view, if we compare it to what is theoretically possible.
- jeltz 28d ago
  The agents still write bad code unless my colleagues and the people who submit PRs to the repos I am responsible for somehow use agents from last year. And, no, it is not a question about style or preferences, the code is messy and contains to me as a maintainer obvious bugs.
  - tvink 28d ago
    >still write bad code unless my colleagues and the people who submit PRs It's interesting you feel comfortable to comment with such authority on the capability of a tool you don't even use... Lisp is a bad programming language because my 10 year old brother wrote some really bad stuff, btw!
    - christophilus 28d ago
      I use them. The top 3 models still write terrible code, regardless of harness. They’ll litter the code with safety checks for scenarios we’ve already guaranteed won’t happen. And they’ll solve problems you didn’t ask them to, and they’ll come up with a working, but convoluted solution. They’ll sometimes write really weird code if you’re using them in an obscure language. Basically, they still need a human guiding them pretty closely unless you’re happy to just ship a mountain of vibe coded mush. That said, I haven’t tried Astra in earnest yet. We’ll see in a few weeks whether or not it is a step change.
- quikoa 28d ago
  So why doesn't Anthropic write a good Claude Code in Rust already? Why don't we get a Codex with the polish level of Sublime text editor? These companies have many billion dollar investments and yet their main product is a bloated meh.
  - teaearlgraycold 28d ago
    They don’t hand write it because it would be an embarrassment. At the same time, Claude Code doesn’t really need to be any better than it is while Anthropic has great models no one else has.
- voidhorse 28d ago
  I'm fully convinced that people who think agents write decent code now simply don't read the code. Their bar is "it runs, so it's fine". Just as they produce writing that isn't structured well for humans, they do the same with code. Sure, if you're willing for that code to be write-only and for agents to be the sole interface through which you interact with it, that works fine, but it is not better than what a professional, skilled human could produce. It's often full of pointless crap and design decisions that over index heavily on local structure that make very little sense when global system structure is considered.
  - bigstrat2003 28d ago
    In my experience, the people who are enamored with LLMs for programming fall into one of three categories. Shills, people who could never program decently to begin with, and people who don't care about the quality of their work. Everyone I know who actually is a good programmer and cares about doing a good job has found that LLMs make too many mistakes to be trusted, and avoid them if they can.
    - ux266478 28d ago
      Most people who are good at their job understand the greatest value comes from deep understanding and internalization. Some people have been in roles where alienation from the code is institutionalized, and they've been playing that role for so long that the idea of having a strong understanding and near prescient mental map of a 2 million line codebase sounds absurd. I think the question is less about the capabilities of LLMs and their outputs (because obviously that can change), but because they represent a workflow which codifies exactly that role I mention. You fulfill the role of a manager more than a programmer. You have a vague idea of the codebase, but lack any kind of intuitive mechanical understanding. There are many cases in which I can see an issue, identify the problem, and have it fixed faster than you could prompt an LLM to investigate. After a certain point of familiarity, all reasoning is local reasoning. That's the power of mechanical sympathy. Many, many large shops don't give a shit. They've long since galloped into the dark woods of bureaucratic know-nothing hell. Let the LLM figure that shit out. Those shops are already optimizing for maximal output and churn, so the value proposition seems obvious. I've been smugly saying it for years, but LLMs have me saying it quite a lot more these days: "Sure looks like it sucks down there!"
- ux266478 28d ago
  > Also, humans didn't evolve to write or read code That's a weird way of looking at it. Programming lives at the end of a well-worn path uncountably many millenia long, defined entirely by our biology. We didn't "evolve to do it" in the same way a duck didn't evolve to swim in a specific river.
- xboxnolifes 27d ago
  Didn't evolve to write or read code? Obviously! Humans designed and created programming languages to be human readable and writable. It didnt exist to be evolved toward.
someguynamedq 28d ago
Why do you assume any point in time criticism of AI code generation is reliable to project even a couple of months into the future?
- miyoji 28d ago
  Because all the important ones have been true since 2022 and will be true forever, because they have nothing to do with LLM capabilities and instead are focused on LLM nature.
- bigstrat2003 28d ago
  Because they haven't changed yet (despite AI bros claiming that they have every 6 months), and therefore are unlikely to change as we move into the future. It's not impossible, of course. But when the "this new model is totally better" claims keep turning out to be false, that doesn't give confidence that the future is going to be different.
  - orangecat 28d ago
    But when the "this new model is totally better" claims keep turning out to be false Current models are in fact much better than the top models from a year ago. I have no idea how anyone could claim otherwise without a huge amount of motivated reasoning.
teaearlgraycold 28d ago
I have some lines of code I’ve written that I quite cherish. I’ve posted about such excerpts many times online. So we both like code quite a bit. I think you’re letting your pride get the best of you. Writing software should not be about ego. It’s about making something helpful, or something beautiful, or at the very least financially useful. Interacting with software through a natural language interface does not mandate you are creating junk. I won’t tell you how to use the tool. But I am sure if you were sufficiently motivated you’d learn how to make it work for you.
- Martin_Silenus 27d ago
  It didn't click, did it? You're a kind person, you know, but I'm not. I'm a misanthropic megalomaniac guy. > I think you’re letting your pride get the best of you. Writing software should not be about ego. It’s about making something helpful, or something beautiful The things I'm the proudest of are, by far, the most useless and unhelpful ones. The ones I did for myself. The ones that made me think "wow, now I rock!" and the machine spit its guts crying "mummy help me". That's what the demoscene (to name one subculture) was all about. That's what hacking is all about in the first place. > or at the very least financially useful These have always been the ones I'm the most ashamed about. These were the things I would not have done for myself, but for other people. The ones that kept me living, not the ones that made me feel alive. What did you think I was talking about? > But I am sure if you were sufficiently motivated you’d learn how to make it work for you. I'm motivated to code. I'm not an architect, a QA tester, or whatever, I'm a coder. Now, wanna know what kind of person I am and how I made LLMs work for me long before you suggest it here? Read that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072319#48073350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072319#48073350 Then, come back and we can talk. I WILL NOT ASK A MACHINE SOMETHING I LOVE TO DO MYSELF, WHICH I TAKE PLEASURE FROM. If that looks like an idiotic and stubborn stance to you, FINE.
  - teaearlgraycold 27d ago
    Well I definitely don’t like coding as much as you do. And don’t give up your hobbies to appease anyone, least of all me.
johnnyanmac 26d ago
When there's a day I can get properly architected, performant code out of agents, I will happily let it take over the reins. Because coding is not the hardest part of the process in my domain and I wouldn't mind more time to focus on other aspects if I can trust others to code. But as is: it just output stuff that will not scale properly, and wrangling it takes just as much time as me coding it up myself. So it's in my hands until then. I've found LLM's somewhat useful as a first-order discovery in documentation, and not much farther. Try to trust it as an oracle replacement of all search/documentation and you'll be burned once every few days.

bigupthewhole 28d ago

While this was true 1+ years ago, the agents don't write bad code anymore. They might not write according to your preferences, but you can also have it adjust to your style. Also, humans didn't evolve to write or read code, even the best programmers are terrible at it from an objective point of view, if we compare it to what is theoretically possible.

jeltz 28d ago
The agents still write bad code unless my colleagues and the people who submit PRs to the repos I am responsible for somehow use agents from last year. And, no, it is not a question about style or preferences, the code is messy and contains to me as a maintainer obvious bugs.
- tvink 28d ago
  >still write bad code unless my colleagues and the people who submit PRs It's interesting you feel comfortable to comment with such authority on the capability of a tool you don't even use... Lisp is a bad programming language because my 10 year old brother wrote some really bad stuff, btw!
  - christophilus 28d ago
    I use them. The top 3 models still write terrible code, regardless of harness. They’ll litter the code with safety checks for scenarios we’ve already guaranteed won’t happen. And they’ll solve problems you didn’t ask them to, and they’ll come up with a working, but convoluted solution. They’ll sometimes write really weird code if you’re using them in an obscure language. Basically, they still need a human guiding them pretty closely unless you’re happy to just ship a mountain of vibe coded mush. That said, I haven’t tried Astra in earnest yet. We’ll see in a few weeks whether or not it is a step change.
quikoa 28d ago
So why doesn't Anthropic write a good Claude Code in Rust already? Why don't we get a Codex with the polish level of Sublime text editor? These companies have many billion dollar investments and yet their main product is a bloated meh.
- teaearlgraycold 28d ago
  They don’t hand write it because it would be an embarrassment. At the same time, Claude Code doesn’t really need to be any better than it is while Anthropic has great models no one else has.
voidhorse 28d ago
I'm fully convinced that people who think agents write decent code now simply don't read the code. Their bar is "it runs, so it's fine". Just as they produce writing that isn't structured well for humans, they do the same with code. Sure, if you're willing for that code to be write-only and for agents to be the sole interface through which you interact with it, that works fine, but it is not better than what a professional, skilled human could produce. It's often full of pointless crap and design decisions that over index heavily on local structure that make very little sense when global system structure is considered.
- bigstrat2003 28d ago
  In my experience, the people who are enamored with LLMs for programming fall into one of three categories. Shills, people who could never program decently to begin with, and people who don't care about the quality of their work. Everyone I know who actually is a good programmer and cares about doing a good job has found that LLMs make too many mistakes to be trusted, and avoid them if they can.
  - ux266478 28d ago
    Most people who are good at their job understand the greatest value comes from deep understanding and internalization. Some people have been in roles where alienation from the code is institutionalized, and they've been playing that role for so long that the idea of having a strong understanding and near prescient mental map of a 2 million line codebase sounds absurd. I think the question is less about the capabilities of LLMs and their outputs (because obviously that can change), but because they represent a workflow which codifies exactly that role I mention. You fulfill the role of a manager more than a programmer. You have a vague idea of the codebase, but lack any kind of intuitive mechanical understanding. There are many cases in which I can see an issue, identify the problem, and have it fixed faster than you could prompt an LLM to investigate. After a certain point of familiarity, all reasoning is local reasoning. That's the power of mechanical sympathy. Many, many large shops don't give a shit. They've long since galloped into the dark woods of bureaucratic know-nothing hell. Let the LLM figure that shit out. Those shops are already optimizing for maximal output and churn, so the value proposition seems obvious. I've been smugly saying it for years, but LLMs have me saying it quite a lot more these days: "Sure looks like it sucks down there!"
ux266478 28d ago
> Also, humans didn't evolve to write or read code That's a weird way of looking at it. Programming lives at the end of a well-worn path uncountably many millenia long, defined entirely by our biology. We didn't "evolve to do it" in the same way a duck didn't evolve to swim in a specific river.
xboxnolifes 27d ago
Didn't evolve to write or read code? Obviously! Humans designed and created programming languages to be human readable and writable. It didnt exist to be evolved toward.

someguynamedq 28d ago

Why do you assume any point in time criticism of AI code generation is reliable to project even a couple of months into the future?

miyoji 28d ago
Because all the important ones have been true since 2022 and will be true forever, because they have nothing to do with LLM capabilities and instead are focused on LLM nature.
bigstrat2003 28d ago
Because they haven't changed yet (despite AI bros claiming that they have every 6 months), and therefore are unlikely to change as we move into the future. It's not impossible, of course. But when the "this new model is totally better" claims keep turning out to be false, that doesn't give confidence that the future is going to be different.
- orangecat 28d ago
  But when the "this new model is totally better" claims keep turning out to be false Current models are in fact much better than the top models from a year ago. I have no idea how anyone could claim otherwise without a huge amount of motivated reasoning.

teaearlgraycold 28d ago

I have some lines of code I’ve written that I quite cherish. I’ve posted about such excerpts many times online. So we both like code quite a bit. I think you’re letting your pride get the best of you. Writing software should not be about ego. It’s about making something helpful, or something beautiful, or at the very least financially useful. Interacting with software through a natural language interface does not mandate you are creating junk. I won’t tell you how to use the tool. But I am sure if you were sufficiently motivated you’d learn how to make it work for you.

Martin_Silenus 27d ago
It didn't click, did it? You're a kind person, you know, but I'm not. I'm a misanthropic megalomaniac guy. > I think you’re letting your pride get the best of you. Writing software should not be about ego. It’s about making something helpful, or something beautiful The things I'm the proudest of are, by far, the most useless and unhelpful ones. The ones I did for myself. The ones that made me think "wow, now I rock!" and the machine spit its guts crying "mummy help me". That's what the demoscene (to name one subculture) was all about. That's what hacking is all about in the first place. > or at the very least financially useful These have always been the ones I'm the most ashamed about. These were the things I would not have done for myself, but for other people. The ones that kept me living, not the ones that made me feel alive. What did you think I was talking about? > But I am sure if you were sufficiently motivated you’d learn how to make it work for you. I'm motivated to code. I'm not an architect, a QA tester, or whatever, I'm a coder. Now, wanna know what kind of person I am and how I made LLMs work for me long before you suggest it here? Read that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072319#48073350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072319#48073350 Then, come back and we can talk. I WILL NOT ASK A MACHINE SOMETHING I LOVE TO DO MYSELF, WHICH I TAKE PLEASURE FROM. If that looks like an idiotic and stubborn stance to you, FINE.
- teaearlgraycold 27d ago
  Well I definitely don’t like coding as much as you do. And don’t give up your hobbies to appease anyone, least of all me.

johnnyanmac 26d ago

When there's a day I can get properly architected, performant code out of agents, I will happily let it take over the reins. Because coding is not the hardest part of the process in my domain and I wouldn't mind more time to focus on other aspects if I can trust others to code. But as is: it just output stuff that will not scale properly, and wrangling it takes just as much time as me coding it up myself. So it's in my hands until then. I've found LLM's somewhat useful as a first-order discovery in documentation, and not much farther. Try to trust it as an oracle replacement of all search/documentation and you'll be burned once every few days.