| I haven't reduced my thinking! Today I asked AI to debug an issue. It came with a solution that it was clearly correct, but it didn't explain why the code was in that state. I kept steering AI (which just wanted to fix) toward figuring out the why and it digged through git and github issue at some point,in a very cool way.
And finally it pulled out something that made sense. It was defensive programming introduced to fix an issue somewhere else, which was also in turn fixed, so useless. At that point an idea popped in my mind and I decided to look for similar patterns in the codebase, related to the change, found 3. 1 was a non bug, two were latent bugs. Shipped a fix plus 2 fixes for bugs yet to be discovered. |
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| ▲ | Fire-Dragon-DoL 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think my message is doing a disservice to explaining what actually happened because a lot of it happens in my head. 1. I received the ticket, as soon as I read it I had a hunch it was related to some querying ignoring a field that should be filtered by every query (thinking)
2. I give this hunch to the AI which goes search in the codebase in the areas I suggested the problem could be and that's when it find the issue and provide a fix
3. I think the problem could be spread given there is a method that removes the query filter, it could have been used in multiple places, so I ask AI to find other usages of it (thinking, this is my definition of "steering" in this context)
4. AI reports 3 more occurrences and suggests that 2 have the same bug, but one is ok
5. I go in, review the code and understand it and I agree, it doesn't have the bug (thinking)
6. AI provide the fix for all the right spots, but I said "wait, something is fishy here, there is a commit that explicitly say it was added to remove the filter, why is that?" (thinking), so I ask AI to figure out why the commit says that
7. AI proceeds to run a bunch of git-history related commands, finds some commit and then does some correlation to find another commit. This other commit introduced the change at the same time to defend from a bug in a different place
8. I understand what's going on now, I'm happy with the fix, the history suggests I am not breaking stuff. I ask AI to write a commit with detailed information about the bug and the fix based on the conversation
There is a lot of thinking involved. What's reduced is search tooling. I can be way more fuzzy, rather than `rg 'whatever'` I now say "find this and similar patterns" | | |
| ▲ | glemmaPaul 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Thanks for expanding your comment. But to what you explain here, I think your knowledge and comprehension has only slimmed down a notch. It seems to me that this argument equates thinking to be on the vertical vertices only, but may I say there is a horizontal/broad aspect to it? e.g. You lose grip on what is a good combination of framework/language/standards, you remove the abstraction of multiple layers of external and internal APIs, you leave to study the right software pattern for the job, having the AI comprehend the large chunks for you (thats all loss on thinking). You've lost simple querying and digging through codebase. Gosh, lets even say you lost a bit of git command knowledge. You catch my drift here? I am completely for using AI as a tool to do a lot of the boilerplate work with the right directions. Though remembering some changes in codebase before and letting LLMs do the work, is not the same to me as fully owning up to your system as you know, you actually know.
Old man shouting at screen so, to each their own of course! Cheers | |
| ▲ | booleandilemma 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Did you use your AI to create that list for you? | | |
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