alt Hacker NewsAre these the same people who say it doesn't work well? I've been experimenting with writing what I actually mean by that (with the help of an LLM, funny enough), and it seems to be giving me much better code than the typical AI soup. e.g.
- functional core, imperative shell. prefer pure helpers.
- avoid methods when a standalone function suffices
- use typed errors. avoid stringly errors.
- when writing functions, create a "spine" for orchestration
- spine rules: one dominant narrative, one concept per line, named values.
- orchestration states what happens and in what order
- implementation handles branching, retries, parsing, loops, concurrency, etc.
- apply recursively: each function stays at one abstraction level
- names describe why something exists, not how it is computed
This is no different from writing a style guide for your team/org. You don't just say "write clean code" and expect that you'll get something you like.
To play devils advocate, why do we have to layout a simple task in PAINSTAKING DETAIL to an AI model which is "PHD LEVEL" and going to take our jobs in 6-12 months?
Why am I still holding its hand like it has the intellect and experience of a new-hire intern that's coded one project in college?
I would never expect to have to layout every detail about "how to write code" to someone I hired to code on my team, at the SWEII and above level. (I.e, sub-senior but beyond junior)
In fact, often times backlog items are "fix bug in x where y is happening" or "add instrumentation to X so that we can see why it's crashing at runtime".