People are not emotionally ready to accept that certain layers of abstraction don’t need as much care and effort if they can be automated.

We are at the point where a single class can be dirty but the API of the classes should be clean. There’s no point reviewing the internals of a class anymore. I’m more or less sure that they would work as intended.

Next step is that of a micro service itself. The api of that micro service should be clean but internals may be however. We are 10% here.

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yobbo 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"The only reason people disagree with me is because they are emotionally deficient."

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andersonpico 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It goes from "llms can do everything as well or better to a human" to "quality doesn't really matter" really fast.

	▲	danielbln 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It also went real fast from "GPT hallucinated a library, literally useless" to "this agent has created this entire service up to spec" real fast too.

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alt187 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As opposed to me, who is perfectly rational.

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dcchambers 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Does performance not matter?

What if your AI uses an O(n) algorithm in a function when an O(log n) implementation exists? The output would still be "correct"

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keeda 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Does performance not matter?

No, unfortunately. In a past life, in response to an uptime crisis, I drove a multi-quarter company-wide initiative to optimize performance and efficiency, and we still did not manage to change the company culture regarding performance.

If it does not move any metrics that execs care about, it doesn't matter.

The industry adage has been "engineer time is much more expensive than machine time," which has been used to excuse way too much bloated and non-performant code shipped to production. However, I think AI can actually change things for the better. Firstly, IME it tends to generate algorithmically efficient code by default, and generally only fails to do so if it lacks the necessary context (e.g. now knowing that an input is sorted.)

More importantly though, now engineer time is machine time. There is now very little excuse to avoid extensive refactoring to do things "the right way."

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

> Does performance not matter?

Performance can be a direct target in a feedback loop and optimised away. That's the easy part. Taking an idea and poof-ing a working implementation is the hard part.

	▲	simianwords 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Also most performance optimisations exit at the microservice architecture level, or db and io level

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inetknght 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If it's not tested, it's not Engineered.

Test what you care about. If you care about performance, then test your performance. Otherwise performance doesn't matter.

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paxys 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As it stands today the average engineer is much more likely to ship an unoptimized algorithm than an AI.

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simianwords 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In most cases no. Bottleneck is usual IO.