It's kinda funny that people are now taking decades of good coding practices seriously now that they work with AI instead of humans.

▲

roxolotl 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I was talking to a coworker about how they get the most out of Claude Code and they just went on to list every best practice they've never been willing to implement when working previously. For some reason people are willing to produce design documentation, provide comments that explain why, write self documenting code and so on now that they are using LLMs to generate code.

It's the same with the articles about how to work with these tools. A long list of coding best practices followed by a totally clueless "wow once I do all the hard work LLMs generate great code every time!"

	▲	nzach 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> For some reason people are willing to produce design documentation.... I'm assuming you wrote that just for dramatic effect but let me explain why I think this behavior is completely rational. If you implement "feature X" you already learned everything you needed, so adding documentation is a task that doesn't bring you any benefits. You could argue that it would make your life easier when you have to do some maintenance in this code, but that is a pretty big time investment for something you may use some day. But now with LLMs that reasoning changes dramatically. Having good documentation makes your life easier right now. And the same argument can be made for every good practice that people never bothered to follow: commit messages, tests, variable naming, ... For example, where I work the 'developer experience' team created a bot that reads your merge requests and judges your changes to understand if they are small enough to bypass the need to have an explicit approval from a coworker. And one of the things that it takes into account is how well documented is this change. If you have a small change without any context the bot won't approve your MR, but you explain the bug and add some relevant tests it will approve your MR and allow you to skip the human code review. And the result of this new bot is that people are starting to better document their changes, because this allows them to work faster. So, I agree with GP that is funny to see this play out. But it should not be a surprising behavior for anyone that understand how software is written.

▲

kingstnap 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"Context engineering" + "Prompt Engineering":

1. Having clear requirements with low ambiguity. 2. Giving a few input output pairs on how something should work (few shot prompting). 3. Avoiding providing useless information. Be consicise. 4. Avoid having contradictory information or distractors. 5. Break complex problems into more manageable pieces. 6. Provide goals and style guides.

A.K.A its just good engineering.