With luck, SWE culture will change towards caring about large-scale rearchitecture (and reward those who care enough to refactor and polish, polish, polish.)

I recently found Opus is pretty good at consolidating very-similar-but-different codebases.

Sure, I had to tell it to so, but it trudged through and did it fairly independently… Was especially nice as refactoring test infrastructure code isn’t always very exciting…

I’ve toyed with the idea of splitting a deeply nested tree of code into separate libraries for this.

First impression is that it’s a net negative. It gets a lot better at working within that library, and much worse at making it work within the project as a whole.

Which again is ironic, because I've been doing that for most of my career whenever I am introduced to a legacy code base: The first thing I try to do is delete code. I think it's just good engineering practice to try and delete code as much as possible.

You would lose something but it is because the trade off in complexity isnt worth it. This is the key to keep code low. If there is a thing that is barely used but is 60% of the code, maybe it can go? Ai will try and keep it backward comp forever.

Right, the thing I find it does really often is to replicate policy through more than one mechanism. For example, this week, I was working on a const structure in rust that i needed to be able to serialize in a const context. It implemented the calculation of the serialized string length independently from the serialization string. It would certainly have worked, and probably for a long time, but it opened a potential bug route that I never would have created. This was on a single module.

Just last month I asked someone on the team to add some alerts. We like everything to be declaratively defined in the repo and we push metrics, and we have an alerting system. We just needed some plumbing to be able to define alerts that get created or updated on every deployment. I said to start lets add an alert for X metric, then we can take it from there.

He took the instructions, plopped them into an agent, generated ~400 lines of change that add the alert. The problem was the entire 400 lines were custom for that X metric. Meaning if we needed to add a second alert, it’s another 400 lines. The entire thing is generic plumbing and defining resources. Any reasonable engineer would make it so that the second alert to add would be 2 or 3 line change to just define the metric and its alerting threshold (and whatever other parameters for the alert) not re-do the entire setup every time for every metric. I felt stupid having to explain that to another senior engineer.

That reddit post is written from the perspective of someone who's actually pro AI ("It felt great for about 6 months ...") and only realizes retrospectively they ended up in a mess. So there's no internal inconsistency in the narrative.

Anyway most of reddit is dead internet and that post is just engagement farming... As is most of hn.

The author specifically claims to have written the article themselves and not used AI, so you are basically accusing them of being a liar. You might want to be a bit more cautious about committing direct defamation. Just sayin' :-)

At least leave the bureaucracy to humans. It’s the only thing we have left.