Getting AI to Work in Complex Codebases

smart generalists with a lot of depth in maybe a couple of things (so they have an appreciation for depth and complexity) but a lot of breadth so they can effectively manage other specialists,

and having great technical communication skills - be able to communicate what you want done and how without over-specifying every detail, or under-specifying tasks in important ways.

I think this attitude is part of the problem to me; you're not aiming to be faster or more efficient (and using AI to get there), you're aiming to use AI (to be faster and more efficient).

A sincere approach to improvement wouldn't insist on a tool first.

Also, strongly-typed languages tend to catch more issues through the language server which the agent can touch through LSP.

And then I find models try to write scripts/manual workflows for testing, but Go is REALLY good for doing what you might do in a bash script, and so you can steer the model to build its own feedback loop as a harness in go integration tests (we do a lot of this in github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer/tree/main/hld)

That said, I don't think it takes MORE τέχνη to use the machine, merely a distinct ἐμπειρία. That said, both ἐμπειρία and τέχνη aren't σοφία.

I can assure you both kinds of people exist. Expressing ideas as words or code is not a one-way flow if you care enough to slow down and look closely. Words/clauses and data structures/algorithms exert their own pull on ideas and can make you think about associated and analogous ideas, alternative ways you could express your solution, whether it is even worth solving explicitly and independently of a more general problem, etc.

The best climber in the world loves climbing. Same with drives, cheffs, and yes, people who write code.

Horrible, right? When I asked gemini, it guessed 37 cents! https://g.co/gemini/share/ff3ed97634ba

The only moves are refusing to review it, taking it up the chain of authority, or rubber stamping it with a note to the effect that it’s effectively unreviewable so rubber stamping must be the desired outcome.

Closed > will not review > make more atomic changes.

I treat "uses AI tools" as a signal that a person doesn't know what they are doing

You can vibe code using specs or just by having a conversation.

Truly we live in the stupidest timeline. Imagine if you had a domestic robot but when you asked it make you breakfast you had to preface your request with “it’s critical that you don’t kill me.”

Or when you asked it to do the laundry you had to remember to tell it that it “must not make its own doors by knocking holes in the wall” and hope that it listens.

INVOKE THE ULTRATHINK OH MIGHTY CLAUDE AND BLESS MY CODE.

Have you tried kissing the keyboard before you press enter? It makes the code 123% more flibbeled.

We are years into this, and while the models have gotten better, the guard rails that have to be put on these things to keep the outputs even semi useful are crazy. Look into the system prompts for Claude sometime. And then we have to layer all these additional workflows on top... Despite the hype I don't see any way we get to this actually being a more productive way to work anytime soon.

And not only are we paying money for the privilege to work slower (in some cases people are shelling out for multiple services) but we're paying with our time. There is no way working this way doesn't degrade your fundamental skills, and (maybe) worse the understanding of how things actually work.

Although I suppose we can all take solice in the fact that our jobs aren't going anywhere soon. If this is what it takes to make these things work.

You want to do that, but Ill bet money you arent doing it.

Thats the problem: this is speculative; maybe it scales sometimes, but mostly people do not work on ten things at once.

“Fix the landing page”

“I’ll make you ten new ones!”

“No. Calm down. Fix this one, and do it now, not when youre finished playing with your prompts”

There are legitimate times when complex pieces of work decompose into parallel tasks, but its the exception not the norm.

Most complex work has linked dependencies that need to be done in order.

Remember the mythical man month? Anyone? Anyone???!!??

You can't just add “more parallel” to get things done faster.

You can’t do 10 of these processes at once, because there’s 8 minutes of human administration which can’t be parallelised for every ~20min block of parallelisable work undertaken by Claude. You can have two, and intermittently three, parallel process at once under the regime described here.

That coupled with the fact that you have to meticulously review every single thing the AI does is going to obliterate any perceived gains you get from going through all the trouble to set this up. And on top of that it's going to be expensive as fuck quick on a non trivial code base.

And before someone says "well you don't have to be that thorough with reviews", in a professional settings absolutely you do. Every single AI policy in every single company out there makes the employee using the tool solely responsible for the output of the AI. Maybe you can speed run when you're fucking around on your own, but you would have to be a total moron to risk your job by not being thorough. And the more mission critical the software the more thorough you have to be.

At the end of the day a human with some degree of expertise is the bottleneck. And we are decades away from these things being able to replace a human.

In my experience with workflows that let humans and humans (let alone AIs) collaborate effectively, they are NP-hard problems.

Every feature I’ve asked Claude Code to write was one I could’ve written myself.

And I’m quite certain it’s faster for my use case.

I won’t be bothered if you choose to ignore agents but the “it’s just useful for the inept” argument is condescending.

So, is it good for writing requirements, and creating design, if not for coding?

I believe people are being honest when they say these things speed them up, because I'm sure it does seem that way to them. But reality doesn't line up with the perception.

These tools change all the time, very quickly. Important to stay open to change though.