[slaymaker1907]

My favorite is when someone is demoing something that AI can do and they have to feed it some gigantic prompt. At that point, I often ask whether the AI has really made things faster/better or if we've just replaced the old way with an opaque black box.

[naasking]

The gigantic prompt has a side benefit though: it's documentation on design and rationale that otherwise would typically not get written.

[ruszki]

Until now, it was a code smell if you need those often. There are exceptions to that, but those are a small minority.

Also, design and rationale what humans need is different than what LLMs need. Even what is needed according to humans writing code/documentation and what’s needed for reading is different, that’s why we have that many bad documentation. There are ton of Apache projects whose documentation is rather a burden than helpful. They are long and absolutely useless.

[naasking]

> Until now, it was a code smell if you need those often. There are exceptions to that, but those are a small minority.

Documentation for a system, particularly a rationale, is never a code smell.

> There are ton of Apache projects whose documentation is rather a burden than helpful. They are long and absolutely useless.

LLM prompts are short and to the point by comparison, that's part of my point.

[ruszki]

> is never a code smell

/* This changes the sorting of the original list based on the result, when you use a pipeline <- you have an architectural problem - this happens for example in Splunk */

map()

/* You need to call these in this exact order, one after another <- your architecture is terrible */

processFirst()

processSecond()

processThird()

/* We did this unusual thing because we hate encapsulation <- obvious paraphrase, and lie, you were just lazy, or you didn't have time */

class A {

public static String x

}

In unrelated code: A.x = "something";

/* We merged these two classes because they looked similar, in the code we have a lot of switches and ifs to differentiate between them, we explained them one-by-one <- do I need to explain this? */

class TwoCompletelyUnrelatedThingsInOne

> that's part of my point

> The gigantic prompt

It was clearly not.*

[hackable_sand]

Null argument. I'd rather have developers who do system design before the system implementation.

[naasking]

Developers who don't document typically do system design beforehand, but that design process often just isn't documented/recorded properly, that's my point. A development environment that records prompt history and lets you use an LLM to query it is a goldmine for auditing and avoiding the pitfalls of Chesterson's fence.