Laurent Bercot
Baldur BjarnasonAll the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with
(Also supports what many have been saying about software quality being a crisis that precedes LLMs, but that’s another story)
Niels Abildgaard@baldur Yes! And not just the code, but also what it implies about their API design, general application architecture, etc.
Martijn Frazer@baldur the software crisis is definitely what enabled vibe coding, I feel.
When making software was an artisan process, it was hard for corporations to scale it and treat programmers like cogs in a machine.
So they've been trying more and more to fit software development into a neat mold, essentially dumbing down the process, to the point where making an app has become "just slap together some libraries and hey presto".
That has 100% laid the foundation for LLM-generated code, I feel.
@Tijn Yup. I agree
Cassandrich@dalias @baldur Yeah this is fair imho!
What I was mainly trying to convey was a sense of caring about what is you're building as a developer.
That's the thing that's lacking imho from corporate coding practices. The workers don't have to care about the software, they don't have to understand the whole thing, they just need to solve the ticket and move on.
This mindset fundamentally undermines the quality of any software project. And also perfectly lays the foundation for LLM-generated code.
Pier Hegeman@dalias @Tijn @baldur I think this framing is a sort of victim blaming. It is not the individual developers who must love and care about the craft. It is the organizations who must mandate, validate, and ultimately incentivize quality. When all funding for architecture, design, QA and maintenance are cut and everything is left to the developer it is an organizational failure, not an individual one. I don’t need my plumber to love their craft, I just need them to follow code and pass inspection. I do agree that this was a problem long before LLMs came along.
@pier @Tijn @baldur I think you're saying exactly what I was trying to say. As someone doing a job you don't have an obligation to love and care for the craft. But the organization you're working for has an obligation to make sure you pay all due attention to safety of the things you produce and to design the process accounting for the possibility that you might fail to do so. Not to incentivize you to cut corners or look the other way when you do.
@dalias @Tijn @baldur Yeah I was meaning to reply further up the chain; I find threading in Ice Cube a bit goofy. I agree with everything you said. I’d even take that further though and suggest that major software platforms that impact significant portions of society should be way more heavily regulated, along the lines of utilities or banks. Relying on an organization to enforce quality when all of their incentives push towards “move fast and break things” is going to be a losing play.
Arthfach 🐻
slotos@Tijn @baldur I’d actually disagree. Treating engineering as artisanal activity is what led to rot in every instance I witnessed it.
It’s once you remove engineering from development that building software devolves into “slap libraries together and call it steampunk”.
And corporates love that. Something about being able to bullshit your way every direction makes managers so damn happy. Not having engineers ask hard questions is a cherry on top.
@slotos @baldur I agree perhaps artisanal was a bad word to use.
As I've tried to explain in another reply to this, the main thing I'm trying to convey is a sense of care that I'd like to see from the developer.
It's that care that slows things down, which is why corporate coding practices don't focus on it at all. "Just make sure it passes the tests" is what we get instead.
As I see it, LLM-generated code is just the next logical step down a line that was misguided in the first place.
Angie
Dan W@Tijn @baldur @angiebaby
Other industries are trying to replace skilled information workers with bots too.
I’m an automotive parts interpreter that specialises in crash repairs, the amount of BS generated estimates that come across my desk that are completely wrong is astonishing!
And when you provide the correct estimate to the repairer, they are in denial. “The computer said I need these parts, *you* must be wrong”.
Then they call back a week later for me to order and supply the correct parts.
We also refuse credit returns on parts orders that haven’t been vetted by us.
Rycochet@baldur Remember when Elon declared he was going to use lines of code produced on printouts as something he wanted to judge Twitter employees on when deciding who should and shouldn't be fired? It's that mindset made into a machine.
Stage name Jay Peach
Peter@baldur I ended up in a couple of places like that and never lasted long, because I was told, to my face and quite seriously, that a) my standards were too high and b) that I care too much about my values. They meant it as a negative, which I will never, ever understand. (all of them advertised themselves as "values-based" organizations. fuck startups. 😂)
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
JennyFluff 
💾
GunChleoc
bituur esztreym@rysiek @peter_sc @baldur
i&i miss the Tao of programming attitude, sometimes.. #prplXprpgnd
edit: was thinking of Tao te Chip too of course:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070314235504/http://internet.ls-la.net/comppoems/tao-te-chip.html
Briala@baldur I've been a programmer since I was in high school. The rather large employer I had been at for many years and was let go from 2 months ago was not only leaning into the whole "AI" shit but actively separating software engineering and software coding.
I could see general coding quality was dropping. And their very processes was preferencing dumb code monkeys who didn't want to understand the design.
David Culley@static You're better off not being there anymore.
I was in a similar situation, only that I resigned myself, by my own choice.
@davidculley Yah. I was looking for an exit, TBH. I was kinda expecting redundancy of just me and maybe a few colleagues early April, but they did all of us at the end of January. I _am_ on the recovery from burnout. It takes time.
Howard Chu @ Symas@baldur Like I always said, closed-source code is closed because they have something to hide. Mostly, how atrociously bad it is.
degenerating degenerate@baldur Is it possible your opinion about their internal code quality just isn't the constraint that you think it is? After all it's only the scaffolding around the LLM that does the actual work.
Interesting article on them from a couple of weeks ago telling their basing on $21bn of Google's TPUs (which run Gemini for Google) going forward rather than GPUs.
John Maxwell
Wydamn@hopeless No investments, but resorts to emotional responses and ad hominem.
Also your article also says nothing in regards to code quality but I suspect that's not why you posted it.
Please meditate on this, and don't ask claude or grok or whatever to do your meditation for you.
@wydamn I'm sorry, are you referring to the now blocked person who wanted to call me a "shill", twice?
That's an "emotional response", right? And an "ad hominem" too.
So why are you wagging your finger at me and not the guy trying to bully me?
The article is shows you don't need power-hungry GPUs to run inference, and that if Anthropic didn't have staff to go to the bank for them, they still wouldn't cry all the way to the bank over what a guy on Mastodon says about their code quality...
@hopeless But you were shilling though, and you still are.
When you post a forbes propaganda article about money people making money and how that is a good thing and ignores the technical argument: that is shilling.
You say you are not invested, but if somebody "wagging their finger" at you makes you feel bad, then guess what: You Are Invested.
@wydamn I see... well, let me share a metric I like to use when deciding who to block... "is this person ever going to say anything worth listening to?".
If the answer seems to be "no", then on to the block list they go. You're very welcome to use the same logic on me, I won't be able to tell the difference since you'll already be blocked.
Major Denis Bloodnok
SkjeggtrollI mean, we've seen similar issues with code quality from certain types of outsourcing setups where companies send out under-thought and over-written tickets to an outsourcing mill and gets back knee-jerk code that appears as if it's been written at haste while wearing blinkers in a snow-storm, and without any traces of "second-layer thought." (_Not_ the fault of the individual programmers who are often very bright, mind. It's a system failure.)
pettter@skjeggtroll I'm seeing a lot of "system failures" at this point. Perhaps it would be a good idea to consider, or even actively work towards, a systemic change? @baldur
Theriac
Orb 2069
Moses Izumi@baldur
Sometimes I wonder if the practice of shipping every GUI-era computer with a development environment (getting the "rubes" invested in programming) would've prevented the current situation.
Sometimes I wonder if the practice of shipping every GUI-era computer with a development environment (getting the "rubes" invested in programming) would've prevented the current situation.
... Personally, I think IDEs are part of the problem - nobody needed Visual Studio to write BASIC code for their C64, mainly because the programming language is claw hammer straightforward. Learn a dozen keywords and 3 concepts(variables, loops, ifs) , and you're off!
@Orb2069 @moses_izumi @baldur IDEs are great when you need to learn a big codebase though that you want to clean up, because you can navigate through functions and find their usages really fast. Having to grep everything and manually open the files in a text editor is very time consuming.
@gunchleoc
Fair, but nobody learns to fly a plane on the flight deck of a 747 - they sit you in a cessna with six gauges and maybe six controls if you include the radio PTT.
@gunchleoc
I've heard people say HyperCard was like that for GUI code, but I've never tried it.
Sharp Cheddar Goblin@baldur I have coworkers sharing architecture breakdowns of Claude as though this is something amazing and good. The slop has completely rotted their brains. They are no longer engineers.
Not a Spring OnionThe Faang of Gore proudly present:
AI Design Pattern: Landfill
The only pattern you will ever need.
No complex structure. Only one interface (that to the LLM). The rest is simply a landfill.
New feature? Just dump it in the landfill.
Dead code? Stays in the landfill.
Function that should be refactored? Refa-what?
Robin Syl 🌸
@baldur if the same code was posted by a human developer, people would make fun of it. The robots get more leeway. The double standard is disheartening.
See: the anthropomorphizing and blame shifting 'Hallucinating' vs the anthropomorphizing and blame placing 'lying' or the technically correct 'wrong output'.
The chatbot is jus a uwu smol beans tryin it's best, but if you get upset at it trying to kill you by giving you a pizza recipe with glue in it, supporters call you an idiot for assigning software motivations.
Ntropic@baldur On my first larger project in high school I once wrote 10.000 lines of code in one all-night session. It was one large function, I was very proud of it. It worked. It was the only time in my life that I wrote worse code than what Anthropic did here.
This company is evaluated at 2.5x what would be needed to end extreme poverty for a year.
Stefan Scholl@baldur one famous PHP user once said, “There's a rewrite in 3 years,” and that's the mindset of many programmers today.
stonedonkey 🕹️🎮👾@baldur actual developers waiting to clean up the mess in a few years
Liminal witch 🧙♀️ Sarah@TheStoneDonkey @baldur nope, I'm not looking forward to the Great Cleanup of 2028. There will be a Great Rewrite of 2035 which might be more interesting.
NSKE@TheStoneDonkey @baldur "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."
lesbian propaganda (211695-343)@baldur Niklaus Wirth was just right
derptron@baldur I'm not one of those people, but I have been saying it for some time :p
I mean...the industry just expressed shock not too long ago that you need to review the code generated by AI's. I think this was last week or something...
Yeah, it's all stupid as fuck, run by chucklefucks, and overrun by people who just want to make lots of money and don't give two fucks about any of this shit.
RRB@baldur Make software vendors (and their C-suite) financially liable for damages caused by their product, and their C-suite criminally liable if human death occurs because of en error.
Minimum 10 year sentence for C-suite for abuse, or leaking, of user private data.
I think we will all have a more secure, stable, and financially prosperous life because of this.