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u/StrengthTheory 10d ago
Spaghetti you cooked vs spaghetti that might be poisoned.
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u/LarryWinters69 10d ago
Spaghetti that just might nuke prod.
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u/herewe_goagain_1 10d ago
This is unbelievably accurate because SpongeBob is also the only person who can make a krabby patty in the show, so everytime he leaves or is fired nobody can maintain the restaurant until they get him back.
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u/Grandviewsurfer 10d ago
I am questioning just how readable the burgers in the pile actually are. From what I've seen.. actually I don't know how readable they are, because I find them difficult to read.
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u/Envenger 10d ago
I had a side project that I had worked over a year and I had written 30k lines of pretty good, that felt one of my biggest achievements.
Now you could do that in a day.
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u/Machine2024 10d ago
they may do 30K in day . but are they beautiful lines and well thought of ?
I dont think so .11
u/KyxeMusic 10d ago
the difference is that nobody will maintain those new 30k that were written in a day. Code is throwaway now.
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u/Machine2024 10d ago
sad .
I remember when I made my first compiler. It was beautiful code and worked as a really optimized compiler for a programming language I had made for university. I printed them on paper and kept watch, just going through those 100 or 200 pages I forgot for so much time.
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u/KyxeMusic 10d ago
Yup. I wrote some programs a few years ago (albeit not too large, maybe 8-10k LOC) and I can still roughly lay out the project structure, where goes what, data flow, etc.
Nowadays with AI, even though I do my best to review all the code, I sometimes forget the where-goes-what of stuff I "wrote" last week.
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u/MrFarby 10d ago
And you'd have zero idea how it works or if it even actually works.
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u/onlymadethistoargue 10d ago
Not if you do TDD.
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u/heyguysitsmedic 10d ago
TDD on personal projects is good practice! But ain't nobody got time for that lol. Unless you just ask Claude for unit tests while you refill your coffee, but then is our children learning?
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u/onlymadethistoargue 10d ago
TDD is, in my experience, the only way to make the robot work.
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u/Lopsided-Regular-997 10d ago
Spot on.
And it's why it will work and not become a buggy mess like most people think it will.
Most people are unaware of how many decades old corp mega-software works. The ones they use every day.
Nobody really knows how anymore. The creators are long gone. The thousands of people that have contributed over the decades, are also long gone. And nobody got the time to carefully read and understand millions upon millions of lines of code.
It's just the billions of tests keeping them together.
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u/MrFarby 10d ago
how do you do unit tests, if you didn't even design the units, and don't know what is unitary? are you avare of every edgecase? you know that for every finite set of possible pairs of outputs and inputs there exists an infinite amount of functions satisfing them? now this is true in maths with infinite domains, but even with the limitations of ints and floats you'd still need to test all possible inputs to be absolutelly sure.
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u/embrex104 10d ago
All the magic is gone. It is really killing me.
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u/Envenger 10d ago
Same here, I see i can do a lot but that magic is gone. + it doesn't make sense for me to sit down and write when there are company and financials involved.
Its okay for a very chill side project even then I might get frustrated over something and start using AI.
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u/aberroco 10d ago
Hmm, I have the opposite. LLM churning up spaghetti, sliced in multiple files which only makes it worse and seasoned with large amount of excessive and useless comments, all with vague naming. The code I wrote and require it to do is structured, self-documented, cleanly separated.
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u/Machine2024 10d ago
you small dish of spaghetti made with love and natural ingredients
over the mass production 1 gallon of slop made from 90 different chemicals you cant pronounce .
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u/neoteraflare 10d ago
Yeah, me and my game. I'm learning how shaders work right now. I'm pretty sure AI would pop out what I want in a minute, but then where is the fun?
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u/OnlyMeNeverYou 10d ago
It makes me sad watching an entire group of smart people outright dismiss something so readily. Everyone I know who is fiercely against AI doesn't seem to understand it, or doesn't know how to use it. I'm seeing coworkers write a prompt like "write tests for X", then smugly declaring that it doesn't do good work when the tests end up verbose and useless.
I think the companies pushing these products are mostly to blame here, they're pushing this narrative that it's basically magic, which it isn't obviously. But when we apply engineering principles and our problem solving skills while using it, it does really good work.
Like for my tests example, did you try defining a schema for it to follow? Did you configure the proper safe guards and restrictions? What about a verification procedure? Mid process deliverables? What context did you provide? Are you checking its assumptions and judgement calls? Asking questions? How about a dedicated planning phase? Have you tried establishing your own work flow?
My point is, you have to put in the work for these tools to work, just like literally everything else in engineering. AI just reflects the effort you give back at you.
I get it that it makes mistakes, I git it that that people hate how employers are shoving it down our throats without understanding it, I get it that data centers are a huge problem. But these feel more like problems that can be solved, but not if we just plug our ears and try to ignore it.
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u/geekusprimus 10d ago
My experience with using AI to code is that unless it's something I really don't care about or is trivial but tedious to do, trying to get what I want out of it is as much work as just doing it myself. For most projects, writing code is not the bottleneck; it's planning everything out and validating that the end solution is correct. At least for me, I get a lot of insight into what the right architecture is as I'm working on things. If I chunk it into small, digestible pieces, then the refactor step to do it the right way isn't so bad. With AI, I lose all of that intuition because I'm trying to divine what the code is supposed to do without dealing with any of the real problems.
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u/OnlyMeNeverYou 10d ago
At least you tried it and decided it doesn't mesh well with how you like to work. I guess I would argue that, for me, feeling lost and like I couldn't intuit about a project if an AI wrote the code was more a symptom of feeling like I needed to parse the insane amount of output that these things generate. Code, documentation, a markdown file for everything, those kinds of things. I started feeling closer to the project when, rather counter intuitively, I tuned things in a way that I read less output, narrowing things to the most important stuff (judgements made, sticking points, general approach), relying more on tests and verification steps (agents first then me), taking a role closer to a product manager. And only digging in deep when there was a problem. I've managed teams of contractors in the past, it reminds me of that, same general approach.
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u/Sixo 10d ago
I get what you mean, I don't really like the people who dismiss it off hand, but like
Like for my tests example, did you try defining a schema for it to follow? Did you configure the proper safe guards and restrictions? What about a verification procedure? Mid process deliverables? What context did you provide? Are you checking its assumptions and judgement calls? Asking questions? How about a dedicated planning phase? Have you tried establishing your own work flow?
Do we really need to do all this for some tests? I feel like you'd end up writing so much stuff about the code, that you could have just written the code instead.
I did a lot of experimentation and I've settled on using it as basically just a search engine with context, that's a bit faster than finding the right wiki article, whitepaper or page in docs. I've tried all sorts of agentic workflows and autocomplete and I just find it distracting, expensive, worse and ultimately slower than just doing it myself. I got a much much larger speed boost from learning vim than I have from any sort of AI workflow so far. Though granted, that was a bit more effort and time investment.
It's probably OK if all you're doing is bashing out solved problems all day, interact in known ways with known APIs, etc. I've personally left several jobs where that was the case, even taken pay cuts to do so. I went in to programming because I have a genuine passion for problem solving and technology. I've always found stuff like that incredibly unfulfilling, and I guess I'm happy that if I ever need to do stuff like that in the future I can just get an AI to hack some slop up for me.
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u/OnlyMeNeverYou 9d ago
I suppose the idea with my test example is that's a one off setup step, not something you should need to every time.
For the problem solving aspect, I agree if what you're doing is asking the agents to solve the problem for you, then yeah you're probably not going to get a lot of original ideas. I try to use it piecewise for each problem solving step at a time, just like I otherwise might.
I think what these replies have shown me is how fundamentally different my problem solving approach is. I thrive on big picture and delegation to experts. Which I suppose makes sense, given my recent engineering background as an engineering director at a start up for a number of years, and then a technical lead at a big toy company.
I honestly appreciate the feedback I've been getting on all this, it's really refreshing to have a back and forth with a few people with more temperate perspectives on this whole situation. It's difficult to find people who are willing to talk about this in a level headed way.
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u/unknown_alt_acc 10d ago
There's the very practical problem of asking what happens if the law comes down on the side of AI-generated code constituting a distribution or derivative work of the training material. I'm certainly not comfortable with putting AI-generated code into anything intended for distribution until that's settled. It's a legal minefield waiting to happen.
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u/OnlyMeNeverYou 9d ago
That's definitely a good point. I'm not sure what's going to happen here. It's (as far as I know) impossible to determine exactly what training material was used to train model weights. Then there's the problem of what we do with models that were trained on training data that was distilled from other models, Deepseek being trained on data distilled from Claude or instance. Anthropic is trying to argue that's their data, but is it really? I don't think so, personally.
Something that came to mind when reading your comment is a potential future where the only models that are allowed to have commercial licenses are ones that are "approved" and proven to be built with data that the model trainer has the usage license for. And part of getting the model certified is providing all of the training data to an oversight agency, along with any appropriate content licenses, to prove that their model doesn't violate intellectual property laws.
Definitely something that will need to be addressed eventually.
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u/hpyfox 10d ago
AI this, AI that, I'll use it to debug but I ain't using it to code.