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I don't think testing the product alone is good enough, because when you give it tests it has to pass it prioritizes passing them at the expense of everything else — including code quality. I've seen it pull in random variables, break semantic functions, etc.

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ChrisMarshallNY

3 hours ago

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Oh, no. I test. Each. and. Every. Step.

I use a test harness, and step through the code, look at debug logs, and abuse the code, as much as possible.

Kind of a pain, but I find unit tests are a bit of a "false hope" kind of thing: https://littlegreenviper.com/testing-harness-vs-unit/

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mattacular

55 minutes ago

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Code cannot and should not be self documenting at scale. You cannot document "the why" with code. In my experience, that is only ever used as an excuse not to write actual documentation or use comments thoughtfully in the codebase by lazy developers.

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bdangubic

51 minutes ago

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this always starts out right but over the years the code changes and its documentation seldom does, even on the best of teams. the amount of code documentation that I have seen that is just plain wrong (it was right at some point) far outnumbers the amount of code documentation that was actually in-sync with the code. 30 years in the industry so large sample size. now I prefer no code documentation in general

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gravitronic

2 hours ago

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*adds "be intentional" to the prompt*

Got it, good idea.

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clbrmbr

3 hours ago

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Page not rendering well on iPhone Safari.

Good content tho!

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abcde666777

1 hour ago

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My intentionality is that I'll never let it make the changes. I make the changes. I might make changes it suggests, but only upon review and only written with my hands.

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benswerd

1 hour ago

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I think this style of work will go away. I was skeptical but I now write the majority of my code through agents.

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thepukingcat

19 minutes ago

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+1 for this, once you have a solid plan with the AI and prompt it to make one small changes at a time and review as you go, you could still be in control of your code without writing a single line

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benswerd

4 hours ago

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I've seen a lot of people talking about how AI is making codebases worse. I reject that, people are making codebases worse by not being intentional about how their AI writes code.

This is my take on how to not write slop.

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peacebeard

3 hours ago

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Agreed. When you submit code you must take responsibility for its quality. Blaming AI for low quality code is like blaming hammers for giant holes in the drywall. If you don't know how to use AI tools without confidence that your code is high quality, you need to re-assess how you use those tools. I'm not saying AI tools are bad. They're great. But the prevalence of people pushing the tools beyond their limits is not a failure of the tools. Vibe coding may be fun but tight-leash high-oversight AI usage is underrated in my opinion.

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newAccount2025

1 hour ago

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I think this is mostly right.

In a blameless postmortem style process, you would look at not just the mistake itself but the factors influencing the mistake and how to mitigate them. E.g., doctor was tired AND the hospital demanded long hours AND the industry has normalized this.

So yes, the programmers need to hold the line AND ALSO the velocity of the tool makes it easy to get tired AND and its confidence and often-good results promote laziness or maybe folks just don’t know better AND it can thrash your context and bounce you around the code base making it hard to remember the subtleties AND on and on.

Anyway, strong agree on “dude, review better” as a key part of the answer. Also work on all this other stuff and understand the cost of VeLOciTy…

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tabwidth

3 hours ago

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The intention part is right but the bottleneck is review. AI is really good at turning your clean semantic functions into pragmatic ones without you noticing. You ask for a feature, it slips a side effect into something that was pure, tests still pass. By the time you catch it you've got three more PRs built on top.

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peacebeard

3 hours ago

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In my experience trying to push the onus of filtering out slop onto reviewers is both ineffective and unfair to the reviewer. When you submit code for review you are saying "I believe to the best of my ability that this code is high quality and adequate but it's best to have another person verify that." If the AI has done things without you noticing, you haven't reviewed its output well enough yet and shouldn't be submitting it to another person yet.

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skydhash

1 hour ago

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Code review should be a transmission of ideas and helping spotting errors that can slip in due to excessive familiarity with the changes (which are often glaring to anyone other than the author).

If you're not familiar with the patch enough to answer any question about it, you shouldn't submit it for review.

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systemsweird

3 hours ago

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I think there’s just a lot of people who would love to push lower quality code for a variety of legitimate and illegitimate reasons (time pressure, cost, laziness, skill issues, bad management, etc). AI becomes a perfect scapegoat for lowered code quality.

And you’re completely right, humans are still the ones in control here. It’s entirely possible to use AI without lowering your standards.

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mrbluecoat

3 hours ago

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..but unintentional AI (aka Modern Chaos Monkey) is so much more fun!

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benswerd

3 hours ago

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LOL fr. I've been talking with some friends about RL on chaos monkeying the codebase to benchmark on feature isolation for measuring good code.