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I'm always impressed by the ability of the comment section to come up with more reasons why decent design and architecture of source code just can't happen:

* "it's too hard!"

* "my coworkers will just ruin it"

* "startups need to pursue PMF, not architecture"

* "good design doesn't get you promoted"

And now we have "AI will do it better soon."

None of those are entirely wrong. They're not entirely correct, either.






> * "my coworkers will just ruin it"

This turns out to be a big issue. I read everything about software design I could get my hands on in years, but then at an actual large company it turned out to not help, because I'd never read anything about how to get others to follow the advice in my head from all that reading.


Indeed. The LLMs will ruin it. They still very much struggle to grasp a code set of any reasonable size.

Asking one to make changes to such a code set, and you will get whatever branch the dice told the tree to go down that day.

To paraphrase, “LLMs are like a box of chocolates…”.

And if you have the patience to try and tack the AI to get back on track, you probably could have just done the work faster yourself.


> Asking one to make changes to such a code set, and you will get whatever branch the dice told the tree to go down that day.

Has anyone come close to solving this? I keep seeing all of this "cluster of agents" designs that promise to solve all of our problems but I can't help but wonder how it works out in the first place given they're not deterministic.


You’ve got to think like a hype-man: the solution to any AI related problem, is just more compute! AI agent hallucinating? Run 10 of them and have them police each other! Model not keeping up? Easy, make that 100-fold larger, then also do inference-time compute! Cash money yo!

Hmm, I can't see this as a real problem, because if you let it randomly change your APIs to different APIs the project is going to break. Not everyone is writing client apps.

It’s always so aggressive too. What fools we are for trying to write maintainable code when it’s so obviously impossible.



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