[vintermann]

"Were I to reengage, the first step would be at least hundreds of hours of refactoring to pay off accrued technical debt."

Facebook's coding AIs to the rescue, maybe? I wonder how good all these "agentic" AIs are at dreaded refactoring jobs like these.

[xxs]

Refactor doesn't mean just artificial puff-up jobs, it's very likely internal changes and reorganization (hence 100s of hours).

There are not many engineers capable of working on memory allocators, so adding more burden by agentic stuff is unlikely to produce anything of value.

[rvz]

> Facebook's coding AIs to the rescue, maybe? I wonder how good all these "agentic" AIs are at dreaded refactoring jobs like these.

No.

This is something you shouldn't allow coding agents anywhere near, unless you have expert-level understanding required to maintain the project like the previous authors have done without an AI for years.

[kenferry]

Hm, I wonder.

I've done some work in this sort of area before, though not literally on a malloc. Yes you very much want to be careful, but ultimately it's the tests that give you confidence. Pound the heck out of it in multithreaded contexts and test for consistency.

[rvz]

> ...but ultimately it's the tests that give you confidence. Pound the heck out of it in multithreaded contexts and test for consistency.

I don't think so.

Even on LLM generated code, it is still not enough and you cannot trust it. They can pass the tests and still cause a regression and the code will look seemingly correct, for example in this case study [0].

[0] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...

[vlovich123]

AI is more than happy to declare the test wrong and “fix it” if you’re not careful. And the cherry on top is that sometimes the test could be wrong or need updating due to changed behavior. So…