[ruszki]

That can still easily mean that they didn’t give any value or minuscule amount of value to the project which caused their success.

The most successful projects which I’ve seen closely, all of them had only a few people who mattered, everybody else could be replaced at any given time basically, without a real impact. All of the failing ones were those in which those people didn’t exist, or were too few of them. This is exponentially more important in early phases of projects.

[YZF]

fwiw I wrote key features/pieces of pretty much everything I worked on. I was more or less the technical lead (and later engineering manager) on all the software I shipped.

It seems people really want to not believe AI can be useful for strong developers. That's fine. I don't really have a bone in this game, I'm anonymous here, and people can think whatever they choose to ;)

[ruszki]

Anonymity is a two way thing. Maybe, I don't need to use "more or less". Maybe, I'm an ultra heavy user of AI. It's even possible that I'm magnitudes better developer in every single aspects.

Maybe not.

I'm just waiting for somebody who send me code, which was generated by AI, not overwritten almost completely, and it's not shit. The funny thing is that some people here were so convinced that AI is great, that they recorded how they work with AI. And two things:

- They were slower than manual copy pasting

- They still somehow introduced bugs, and very suboptimal solutions...

Also, it would be good, that anybody could show me anything, that shows, how people became not terrible with code review suddenly. Because before AI, it was a common knowledge, that almost everybody was bad with it, and people rarely did it properly, because it was considered annoying, and not because they were useless. There were jokes about rewriting things, exactly because of the same reasons, and they heavily based on reality. And suddenly, we pretend that this changed.

And somehow you should really would need to convince me that the 100s of thousands of lines of code which I generated with AI in the past years, somehow, it's better than what it is. But I'm sure, that it's easier to assume that I didn't try something, than showing only once what "good" means in this case. Unfortunately, there is nothing similar here, than for example "Groovy is a great programming language", which is a dead giveaway that whoever said that is not just bad developer, but somebody who I would fire immediately from every single project to which I'm related to. Especially if they are tech lead. But there are such people, and some of them would claim the same thing as you. // Obviously interns and juniors can think whatever they want. They are labeled as such, because they cannot know yet.

[YZF]

What I do at work is (obviously) not something I can share.

Groovy ;) You must love Jenkins. At least I can rest at ease you won't fire me for that infraction. I used C and C++ most of my career and more recently Go (which I really loved when it was created but my take is a bit more nuanced these days after seeing a really large code base evolve over years).

I'm confused though. You generated 100s of thousands of lines of code using AI and you think it's crap? The code AI generates for me is not some pinnacle of software engineering. It is repeating existing patterns or fairly simple concepts. I treat AI like an quick intern that scales infinitely (or a junior developer). And yes, juniors and interns don't write the best code but in many organizations there is still a fair amount of code written by them.

The thing is that in a large team/project (and the one I'm on has hundreds of developers of various skill levels) there's an endless backlog of things that can be improved including relatively easy features or refactoring. The constraints are either organizational or time. AI enables these things to get done with very little overhead so that's a net positive. It moves the needle for how much time/effort does it take to address "not that hard" issues and with proper prompting and examples it does a decent job. The bar isn't code that John Carmack would write in a week, the bar is improving a certain crappy area of the code to be more reliable or more performant or a little bit cleaner. This is life for most software projects. Yes, in a perfect world every software project is perfection. And maybe some organizations are able to approximate that.

[ruszki]

> I really loved when it was created but my take is a bit more nuanced these days after seeing a really large code base evolve over years

At least, I can be sure that we are not near the same level. But at least, you hopefully will recognize the same thing with new languages… without seeing them failing first.

> You generated 100s of thousands of lines of code using AI and you think it's crap?

This is a funny question. First of all, there are people whose job is to test LLMs. However, I’m not one of them. I simply tried them, generated, and still generate a ton of code with them, then I rewrite basically every single line of them. Because they use for example outdated patterns, which causes the same problems what you’ve seen with Go.

> It is repeating existing patterns or fairly simple concepts.

Yes, and most of the most popular ones are mediocre the best. Average code from which LLMs are learning are made by beginners, not experienced ones, because their sheer number. So LLMs will use those.

> I treat AI like an quick intern

This is always the funniest sentence regarding this. Before AI, it was quite well known that you don’t ever allow interns near important parts of the code. Now, people who supposed to know this, and the reasons for this, somehow forgot this aspect also, just like the review thing.

> AI enables these things to get done with very little overhead so that's a net positive.

No, it does allow to tick a ticket in Jira. And if you handle this in any other way, then you will fail miserably, as how for example Microsoft quite openly did with this.

> a little bit cleaner

Ah yes, the infamous “cleaner”, about which the exact opposite is quite well known, and it’s quite obviously not true with every single vibe coded projects, without exceptions. If that’s cleaner in any environment, then I have a bad news: you’ve never worked with even medior developers, ever. Seriously, that code quality, especially architecturally, is junior level shit.

My previous boss did these low hanging fruits, he at least would never tell anything more than “it’s better than nothing”. And only regarding non-important code, which can fail without real consequences. And can be shit, obviously. The whole point was that even shit is better than nothing. Not that it’s acceptable quality in any way.

At least, you were obvious at least, that your “success” is magnitudes different, than mine. And not regarding code quality, but when a project/product successful. I completely forgot that I’ve met people who sold that their teams completed the most tickets at a company in a given time frame as success. Probably we are closer than this, but still very far away.

[YZF]

Do you have an example of a large scale open source project where you would consider that entire code base to be high quality to your standards?

I think you're saying "my bar is so high you even can't understand where it is". I've worked with hundreds if not thousands of software developers, in many companies from startups to well established ones, including producing products that are what I'd call critical infrastructure that work reliably and do what they're supposed to do. I think I have a pretty decent idea of what an "average" software developer looks like and the overall shape of that curve, and similarly the architecture/design curve of various real world projects. I've built software on my own as a team of one and I've worked with teams of more than 100 people. Anyways, if your assertion is what I wrote above then clearly LLMs can't replace the mythical programmer that you are. But that's not what they're aiming to replace. As to "vibe coded projects" I already said that's not how I use LLMs and I agree that can easily end up like a pile of garbage (but still has its place in the new ecosystem).

The only real test of software is whether it does what it's supposed to do: reliably, is maintainable, can be extended and evolve without losing these attributes. If you've shipped systems that are used by many, work well, can evolve to support new features etc. - kudos to you.