He is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar to his. But in areas where they don’t exist, writing code isn’t a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents.

Even with full context, writing CSS in a project where vanilla CSS is scattered around and wasn’t well thought out originally is challenging. Coding agents struggle there too, just not as much as humans, even with feedback loops through browser automation.

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pseudosavant 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's funny that "restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents" aligns really well with what we have "supposed" to have been doing already, but many teams slack on: quality tests that are easy to run, and great documentation. Context and verifiability.

The easier your codebase is to hack on for a human, the easier it is for an LLM generally.

	▲	cromka 10 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Turns out the single point of failure irreplaceable type of employees who intentionally obfuscated the projects code for the last 10+ years were ahead of their time.
	▲	jimbokun 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It’s really interesting. It suggests that intelligence is intelligence, and the electronic kind also needs the same kinds of organization that humans do to quickly make sense of code and modify it without breaking something else.
	▲	giancarlostoro 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I had this epiphany a few weeks ago, I'm glad to see others agreeing. Eventually most models will handle large enough context windows where this will sadly not matter as much, but it would be nice for the industry to still do everything to make better looking code that humans can see and appreciate.

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michaelbuckbee 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Having picked up a few long neglected projects in the past year, AI has been tremendous in rapidly shipping quality of dev life stuff like much improved test suites, documenting the existing behavior, handling upgrades to newer framework versions, etc.

I've really found it's a flywheel once you get going.

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swordsith 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Truth. I've had much easier time grappling with code bases I keep clean and compartmentalized with AI, over-stuffing context is one of the main killers of its quality.

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jimbokun 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All those people who thought clean well architected code wasn’t important…now with LLMs modifying code it’s even more important.

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chrisjj 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> He is likely working on

... a laundry list phone app.