I probably triggered some PTSD right there.

Was just in a meeting at work, where we listed off everything that makes software development hard and slow. An excersize for the thread would be to replicate that list. It turned out that Claude helps with like 1/5th or less of it....especially in a collaborative environment.

So, the situation we're now encountering is that random business areas can vibe code out something, tell nobody, throw it in AWS, have it become a critical part of a business process that fails when they quit, and nobody even has access to look at what was made.

It gives me comfort that in about 5 years there will be a new surge in demand for programmers to reign in all the rogue applications that need shutdown because of the immense risk to continual operation of a company, from data leaks to broken payroll.

It'll be Y2K all over again.

For a long time programmers have had two types of program verification tools, static analysis (like a compiler's checks) and dynamic analysis (running a test suite). I find myself using LLMs to analyze newly written code more and more. Even when they spit out a lot of false positives, I still find them to be a massive help. My workflow is something like this:

1. Commit my changes
2. Ask Claude Opus "Find problems with my latest commit"
3. Look though its list and skip over false positives.
4. Fix the true positives.
5. git add -A && git commit --amend --no-edit
6. Clear Claude's context
7. Back to step 2.

I repeat this loop until all of the issues Claude raises are dismissable. I know there are a lot of startups building a SaaS for things like this (CodeRabbit is one I've seen before, I didn't like it too much) but I feel just doing the above procedure is plenty good enough and catches a lot of issues that could take more time to uncover if raised by manual testing.

It's also been productive to ask for any problems in an entire repo. It will of course never be able to perform a completely thorough review of even a modestly sized application, but highlighting any problem at all is still useful.

Someone recently mentioned to me that they use vision-capable LLMs to perform "aesthetic tests" in their CI. The model takes screenshots of each page before and after a code change and throws an error if it thinks something is wrong.

I've been thinking a lot about LLM assisted development, and in particular why I keep dropping the available tools after a few attempts at using them.

I realized recently that it's taking away the part of software development I enjoy: the creative problem solving that comes with writing code. What's left is code review tasks, testing, security checks, etc. Important tasks, but they all primarily involve heavy concentration, and much less creativity.

Why aren't agents focused on handling the mundane tasks instead? Tell me if I've just introduced a security vulnerability or a runtime bug. Generate realistic test data and give me info on what the likely output would be. Tell me that the algorithm I just wrote is O(n^2).

Those tasks are so much more applicable to matching against existing data, something LLMs should be extremely good at, rather than trying to get them to write something novel, which so far they've been mostly bad at, at least in my experience.

I've made the decision to purchase a new M5 Macbook Air because of the memorypocalypse. My current M1 model is already upgraded to the amount of memory and storage as the current base model and I'm wondering if it's worth spending the extra 2-4 hundred dollars on memory upgrades today.

My current computer is more than good enough for today but I figure I should probably future proof just in case. I was thinking the 16GB would be enough, but I also know that I'm kind of falling behind by not embracing AI coding agents. According to my research the maximum 32GB is recommended for most coding-relevant models - almost as a minimum.

I work in education so coding is not actually much of a need, and obviously there are cloud providers I could use if I end up needing them in the future. I also have less than a teacher's salary because I work part time, which is the greatest reason why I'm sticking with the 16GB base for the moment, but other than that I also don't do many memory-intensive programs. But I thought I would get some recommendations before they start shipping.

I'd also be interested on people's opinions on trading in my old one, since it'll only get me ~$275 back. I'm considering reneging on that part and keeping it around to act as a web server or give it to my husband who has a computer that still runs Windows 7 and barely uses it.

Eagleson's Law states

"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else."

I keep reading how fewer and fewer of the brightest developers are writing code and letting their AI agent to do it all. How do they know what's really happening? Does it matter anymore?

Curious to hear this communities thoughts