| ▲ | embedding-shape 3 hours ago |
| > There are a lot of workplaces where there isn’t a good mechanism to push back on this and the tech debt just keeps growing. If the "big ball of spaghetti" theory holds, where software companies who can't manage the debt stumble over themselves as they continue to add to the big ball of spaghetti code, I guess we'll see a row of companies declaring "software bankruptcy" or something in some/many months, depending on how well these workspaces learn to care slightly more and get better at pushing back against slop. |
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| ▲ | aryehof an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| What concerns me the most is that improvements in software design are at an end. The “big ball of mud”, which really is a problem of modularity and dependencies, will never improve through innovation because the way it is done now is all there will ever be. |
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| ▲ | codemog 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Coding agents have been better than the average "enterprise" programmer for a while now and nobody wants to admit it or talk about it. I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this. People call coding agents bad because they don't know the asinine meaningless conventions at their particular company while they themselves write awful abstractions and brittle tightly coupled systems, but hey, at least they know how to write a for loop how their particular company likes. |
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| ▲ | jeppester 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Yesterday Claude wanted to add a position column to what is a slightly extended many-many relation table. It did this to "make ordering stable". An average enterprise developer would never add bloat like that up-front, unless if the ability to change the order was a requirement. Obviously a stable order can be easily derived from the ID or a creation time (if available). Setting a position however requires extra steps to ensure the integrity of the sequence. I see things like that all the time, and it's always stuff that grows the code base and adds unnecessary complexity. | |
| ▲ | fzeroracer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this. And how long does it take a coding agent to output a thousand lines of code versus a human? The worst human at any company was rate limited by themselves. Those 'average enterprise' programmers aren't going away, they're the ones now spending tens of thousands on coding agents and filling your codebase with even more garbage without bothering to review an iota of it. | | |
| ▲ | mkozlows 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which is why one of the big problems for the field right now is that a) most code bases still need someone more skilled than a mere robot driver, and b) many developers are not better than that. In the past, a team of five mid devs and one good one would be fine, because that good one would ride herd on the mid ones. But now those mid ones are slamming out robot code that they're incapable of meaningfully reviewing (because it's better than they are already), and they're just overwhelming the good dev's capacity. The solution, of course, is to fire them all -- they're worthless now -- but this is not going to happen quickly, and it's probably for the best that it doesn't. |
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| ▲ | what 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file Why is this worse than splitting it across 1k files? |
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