| ▲ | leoc 3 hours ago |
| > Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable. Wow, it’s true, AI really is set to match human performance on large, complex software systems! ;) |
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| ▲ | jimbokun 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully. It’s just that our industry has a bias towards youth who don’t think they have anything to learn from those who came before them. |
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| ▲ | monkpit 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully. Do they?? | | |
| ▲ | jplusequalt 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I believe this type of person exists. My team lead has worked on the same software for 30 years. He has the ability to hear me discuss a bug I noticed, and then pinpoint not only the likely culprit, but the exact function that's causing it. | | |
| ▲ | DougN7 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I do the same thing in a project I’ve worked on for 25 years. I’ve had mediocre at best results with AI. It’s useful to discuss concepts with, but the code never handles the nuances of the edge cases. |
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| ▲ | ttoinou 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How do you explain to a junior this pile of messy code isn’t crap but is actually years of integrated knowledge ? That the most common principles discussed in computer science (OOP, SOLID, DRY etc.) are actually just little guides that aren’t to be taken to the extremes ? | | |
| ▲ | rented_mule an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Here's a 26-year old post on the exact topic of messiness you raise: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... A decade ago, I was sitting in on a meeting about a rewrite and, before I could say anything, someone in the first year of her career asked why anyone thought a rewrite would be any cleaner once all the edge cases were handled. Afterwards, I asked her where she learned this. She said "I don't know, it just seems kind of obvious." She went on to be a great engineer and is now a great manager. | | |
| ▲ | tudelo 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The bolded quote "It’s harder to read code than to write it." is hilarious given todays context... it has only become more true :) |
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| ▲ | Yokohiii an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's a dice roll to keep the junior around until he unlearns the wrong bits. | |
| ▲ | e9 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Expert knows when to break the rules | | |
| ▲ | ethbr1 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Experts take the time to learn why the fence was there in the first place. | | |
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| ▲ | micromacrofoot an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | tell them they need to turn a profit as quickly as possible | | |
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| ▲ | kiba 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Executive leadership bias older not younger, no? |
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| ▲ | whateveracct 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| it's been 10y and i still haven't seen a human system that bad maybe some that people said were that bad. but they just needed some elbow grease. remember, it takes guts to be amazing! |
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| ▲ | detritus 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The origin of 'dark DNA' begins to make more sense through this sort of lens, except the system somehow maintained a level of compensation to fix all its flaws. |
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| ▲ | elictronic 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | We do as well, it's called bankruptcy. Not every company survives but in the end the ones that do are more resilient. |
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