Houses are still standing built with hand saws and elementary-school level tools; we don't tear them down, just cut new pieces with power tools and bolt on new additions built with new pieces made from advanced tools.
Isn't AI just another purity test? nasty VSCode users instead of pure elite Vim users?
While the maintainers surely will be AI, the last bastion is the architects. Claude can write the scaffolding, but does Claude know how the parts go together? Even the concept of fuzz-testing existing means that even humans can't envision all the failure paths, so it would be unfair to hold the metric against AI. What we are going to see more of is the architectural failures: massive data breaches because the architecture aroung the breach will be reveaed to be laughably simple, from prompts that just didn't know what to ask.
I'm guessing that when he goes to debug a complex problem that spans across multiple systems for his app, he brain is paging through the equivalent of a well-written 3GiB markdown design document file.
And my opinion is, yes, pretty soon SOTAs will be able to be that guy, if we are willing to hand that much control to an AI. But I sure hope we don't--it seems like way too much power for an AI. However: Larry sitting next to Fable working together? A team like that could change the world. I hope he's digging in to Claude or something, I'll have to give him a call.
Good stuff.
> "It’s the record of what the code was supposed to do ... written down somewhere a human or an agent can read them back. Ours are markdown files in git..."
I keep getting surprised how many quite technical people I know are doing real work with AI but have never touched markdown.
If you are one of those people, allow me to offer a suggestion:
Stop. No more sending questions to ChatGPT or Claude until you do the following:
- Install Typora on your Windows or Mac machine.
- Write a .md (markdown text) file a full page long using Typora (or another editor that understands markdown, but Typora will do just fine). Make use of Heading 1, Heading 2, and underline formatting, at least.
- Make the one page file be a complex request to an AI. Something like "research x, compare it to y, make a guess what will happen in the future, here are some of my opinions and guesses, make your replies short, provide references".
Hand that .md file to your favorite AI. (Bonus points for using drag and drop or pointing the AI at the dir the file is in.) Look at your results. Make a change to your .md file. Hand it to the AI again, see the different results.
In my opinion, if you work on a keyboard and you've been making use of AI for the last 8 months, you should have done the above 4 months ago. Until you do, you will have a hard time understanding how drastically AI has changed almost all developer's lives, and how it is changing more and more fields that are not software development.
You need to be able to read and write for yourself at some level.
Markdown is like, the closest thing you can get to WYSIWYG without exiting the realm of machine-readable plaintext.
I keep getting surprised how many people don't realize Linux is a thing.
The crafting of the requirements is better suited to an interactive process. You will have superior results and a quicker turn around by having the AI research the change implications, what current implementations actually do and where (so you can look at the parts you want to), etc.
When working in a BIG codebase, having it detail up a flow of how all the parts fit together is great and helps get you setup to work. Then work through your planned constraints with the AI and make sure the perception matches your intent (with prevents a lot of issues that a fire and forget document creates).
Then when you are satisfied that it sees the problem as you do, have the model capture it and then let it rip.
fk202611•43m ago