However: this conversation is completely out of topic but people instead of talking about AI and code, which is a tabu, will move the conversation to personal attacks and shit like that.
- been a SRE/DevOps at banks/hedge funds for almost 20 years
- now work in L1 crypto
- have been coding since I was 12 and have also been using frontier models for the past year (including running multiple agents at the same time etc).
My thoughts:
The models are indeed amazing. They can read large codebases, find bugs, infer the root cause of an issue from partial logs etc etc.
They do still hallucinate. WAY less than they used to but it's still non-zero. In a way that's worse b/c the model will spit out a complex piece of software and say "Yep, no mistakes. I even wrote tests and they all pass!" You might think "Phew, that's great!" but in the same way we've all found bugs in production code written by smart people, there will be bugs here too.
I say this not to imply that you have to read all of the code. I say if only to underline that for big complex systems, the "let's write unit tests for the parts that ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO BE CORRECT" is still just as important as it ever was. I'm thinking of examples like:
- the order and execution handler of a trading system
- avionics flight controls
- healthcare related medical devices
- etc
As an example: I was working on a complex system. I wasn't sure if the LLM code was actually correct so I wrote up a quick script that I checked, line by line, to be 100% sure it was working as I expected. I then used that script to double check the LLM. I didn't read all of the code the LLM created. The sense of "ok, now this works" was astounding.
I'll add, a lot of the developers I work with are going this "hybrid" route too where they will have the LLM write code and tests but then go back in and double check.
In closing, a lot of these big rewrites with LLMs are possible only b/c the devs KNOW, FOR A FACT, that the unit/integration tests are correct. I'm still not convinced that you can have LLMs write all of the code and all of the unit tests and be 100% sure that it's all correct. (I will admit that this has always been difficult and even the pre-LLM days were not a guarantee that all of the code wa s correct)
Amazon has stolen enormous wealth from you and your collaborators.
People cheer for the hyperscalers even though AWS and GCP are not at all open source themselves, charge absurd margin, and do everything in their power to lock you in.
It's really unfortunate.
Thank you for Redis.
Hopefully AI gives them extra competition. There doesn't seem to be a moat for them yet apart from distribution. Hopefully that holds. The world needs competition and less concentration of power.
They didn't, because the idea is sufficiently non-obvious, but ideas are protected by patents, not copyright.
Valkey has diverged from Redis, gaining features like vector search and multithreading.
OSI purity is hyperscaler brainwashing. They don't want to pay you. They want to take your labor.
Amazon and Google have made billions of dollars off of Redis while the original authors and the company formed around it have gotten none of that.
The best licenses for new database projects are fair source and open core.
Tell the hyperscalers, "fuck you, pay me".
Fuck valkey. Fuck Amazon. Fuck Google.
They're fucking thieves. And they'll lay you off the second they get the chance.
some of those profits are passed on to users too. valkey on aws is cheaper for customers too.
You must be joking.
Until the whole of AWS and GCP are open source, they're taking absurd margins on your business and locking you in.
If you are already locked in then whats the benfit of choosing redis from a pointy haired boss prespective.
Amazon and Google are pouring resources into reducing the fitness of the Redis project, pilfering insane revenues, yet not once has either offered to open source their own core platforms.
They're attacking another company that is powerless to defend itself.
And the community cheers it on.
How kind of them to ensure valkey remains "open" so you can continue to purchase it through their hyperscaler product. They'll get their margins through your other usage and they won't pass that along to the Redis project. They'll be keeping that for themselves.
Sucking the oxygen out of the room while they metastasize into every area of the economy they can grow into. Dumping on healthy markets like an invasive species. Then they buy up the shells of once healthy companies, lay off the workers, outsource the labor.
If you don't want people to use your software and make money, then don't release it with a licence that explicitly says you may make money from this software.
What was stolen?
Okay, so you don't like AWS or Google. Fine. What about the thousands of other hosting companies that use Linux, Apache, Nginx, PHP, Ruby, Python, and Perl for their offerings? Are Yunohost and Dreamhost evil for using Postgres and not open-sourcing their orchestration layer?
The precise reason I build my sites on top of Linux and Apache and Postgres is because I can switch hosts at any time. But what you're advocating for is being completely locked in to the hosting service that is controlled by the company that happened to have authored the database. I would never use a product from a company that had that attitude because I would be completely beholden to them.
I get your frustration that AWS and Google make it hard for database vendors to release their work under a truly open source license. But what you're advocating for would destroy a huge amount of the value of self-hosting and open-source.
m_ke•36m ago
So to make best use of the models steer them down familiar paths, mention common pattern and frameworks, use popular packages and languages that have the high median quality online.
I started my project with a few simple interface definitions and a short design / architecture doc that I include in the AGENTS.md file, but no matter how hard I try all of the models just end up ignoring it and sprinkled new seeds of variants of the same stuff all over my code base, that with each new session grow new branches.
logicprog•27m ago
For instance, a game engine written entirely in LuaJIT, but allocating almost all data structures using CFFI, a very unusual, custom object-orientation DSL I designed myself, and that uses SDL3's SDL_gpu library to do all rendering, a ton of GLSL 4.6 compute shaders cross compiled to SPIR-V and Metal (which constraints what GLSL can be written), and is a hybrid tile-oriented and 3D engine.
Another example is my Emacs-like live-modifiable image-based editor, again in LuaJIT+CFFI, with a kqueue+atomic lock-free ring buffer+pthread based actor model, each running a separate LuaJIT interpreter, with a custom advicing system, event bus, async/await implementation riding on the event bus, a custom process management and IO library, and testing via Tmux.
Even DeepSeek V4 Flash mostly does fine with this, once it's built a few memories in the memory system. Let alone something like DSv4-Pro or GLM 5.2. All I can say is skill issue.
m_ke•15m ago
My second point is that the models are way better at things like Rust or Lua than Python or JS, because the average person producing code in those languages has way more programming experience, so the code quality of training data online in those languages is higher than the programming 101 medium blogspam type content you see in more popular intro languages.
logicprog•7m ago