[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

For scaffolding? I still use snippets (with tooling ofc).

Around 85% of the time, it seems like it takes me more time to write what I want to code in natural language to an AI prompt (and then correct it) than it would to actually code what I want.

The 15% of the time when I want something like "Write test cases to cover this module" is something a snippet couldn't do anyway.

[js8]

> Around 85% of the time, it seems like it takes me more time to write what I want to code in natural language to an AI prompt (and then correct it) than it would to actually code what I want.

That's how it should be, actually 100%. If you need scaffolding (and snippets) it means your language doesn't have (or worse, can't have) the right abstractions in its library.

[necovek]

I am generally fine with duplicating some of the "scaffolding" between projects to aid with readability and have less magic when trying to understand the code.

Eg. most languages would enable you to build a custom library, but then it becomes non-obvious what's exactly happening to someone diving into the project, a most engineers never bother fixing/improving the original library, and you end up with crap on top to "work-around" the poorly understood behaviour.

Eg. recently, I've fixed an internal library holding multiple locks around one tiny block of async code, rendering the entire thing synchronous, which was being worked around by devs using multiprocessing or multithreading for a couple years. I've reduced that library code to basically a couple of functions, but my preference would be to actually copy-paste those 200 lines into every component using it — while you have the problem when you want to update it everywhere, your average engineer focused on solving a different business problem will be better equipped to handle it.

My personal gripe is with the abuse of @decorators in Python, which are side-effect pits of hell (yes, the code can look really nice).

I personally don't use snippets, but I do copy-paste some of that scaffolding between projects (though I am mostly a manager these days and hardly get any time to code, so take that with a huge grain of salt) — snippets as such never added much value to me.

[necovek]

> ...abuse of @decorators in Python, which are side-effect pits of hell.

And just as I posted this, an articles shows up on the front page (https://www.dbos.dev/blog/what-is-lightweight-durable-execut...) claiming this:

> So how does this work? The key is in those decorators, DBOS.workflow() and DBOS.step(). They wrap your functions with the code that durably executes them. At a high level, they persist your program’s execution state–which workflows are currently executing and which steps they’ve completed–in a Postgres database.

Ouch! Those innocent looking lines of @DBOS.workflow or @DBOS.step make decorated functions actually connect to a Postgres database somewhere, and you can't be certain if you can test those functions without Postgres anymore. Ouch, ouch, ouch!

So, developers, please, remember the implicit vs explicit rule of thumb.

[js8]

IMHO What you describe is mostly a tooling problem. Current tooling doesn't let users to see the referenced/abstracted code as simply as the local code (for example, expand function definitions). So people tend to avoid abstracting it.

[necovek]

Yeah, that's a great point!

But solving that tooling issue is hard (or we'd have a great solution already), and we choose our compromises based on the reality we live in. Neither is perfect, and we should continue thinking how we can improve the situation from all angles, including improving the tooling as you suggest.

[atoav]

You're correct it could mean that, but alternatively:

- the use cases covered by the language could be so varied that it would be misguided to expect special functions for each of those cases

- what one programmer describes as scaffolding could be seen as essential part of the setup for others. I have seen essential parts been called "scaffolding" by beginners who had no idea this was not just "text that needs to be there", but it had implications for the whole thing.

[someothherguyy]

> have seen essential parts been called "scaffolding" by beginners who had no idea this was not just "text that needs to be there"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaffold_(programming)

Nothing about scaffolding pertains to how important it is.

[atoav]

A good usecase for LLMs seems to me to be the quick exploration of unknown codebases.

My issue with the code they generate is mostly that the style of abstractions chosen is inconsistent and seems to replicate whatever was the source at any given point. Programming is still about understanding what is going on, not about just writing code, so either way you need to put in the brainwork to understand it.

But as a "just show me an example"-helper it can save you a lot of time, especially if you load highly undocumented and convoluted codebases into it.

In some cases I had the LLM hallucinate functions that would have been wonderful if they existed, but hey.