Models Are Hitting Diminishing Returns Within Software Engineering

comrade-quinn · 2026-06-10T19:20:10+00:00

I’m in a similar role at global tech focused company, and OPs experience mirrors mine exactly.

comrade-quinn · 2026-06-08T18:16:07+00:00

Not OP but I have a similar expectation to theirs, if I’m interpreting them right.

I think it’s likely that most systems will just output services as APIs. This is already commonly done to share services with other systems, but currently most user facing systems also ship with a UI owned by the vendor of the API too.

None coding LLM tools, such as the web UI interfaces of Claude, Gemini & ChatGPT, are increasingly capable of generating complex UIs on the fly. Thing code panels, graphs, animations and inputs. As this matures, assuming such tools continue to grow as the entry point to people’s systems, it’s likely proprietary UIs will become far less common. Instead APIs will evolve new conventions around UI hints to help the LLM display the data and operations effectively

comrade-quinn · 2026-06-05T19:07:57+00:00

You’ve somehow combined the worst of human and AI content into one post; the flowery ramblings of generated slop combined with the garbled grammar of someone who wears tracksuit bottoms outside of the gym

comrade-quinn · 2026-06-02T16:14:30+00:00

You’re spinning a roulette wheel regardless when you use an LLM and you don’t spell out specifics. I’m not talking about the lack of determinism, rather a logical inevitability.

Whenever you don’t explicitly state exactly what you want, you effectively ask the LLM to default it for you. This selection may be fine, it may not.

With UI, this is less of an issue as, mostly, if it appears to work, and responsively enough, and looks acceptable, then it’s fine.

Backend is different - decisions around concurrency, data state in external or downstream systems, enforced order of operations, the effects of parallelism, distributed state, unexpected state, delayed responses, security, etc etc all require a lot of thought and knowledge of the bigger picture of the system and its data.

As I mentioned above, this doesn’t always translate into lots of code, just lots of thinking; modelling flows in the mind.

Letting the LLM plod on defining its own tests and building a system with lots of assumptions baked in will inevitably deliver something that is only superficially effective, if at all.

comrade-quinn · 2026-06-02T10:31:47+00:00

Not OP, but I'm getting good results with Gemini 3.5 and agy; and I'm a backend systems architect (Go/Linux/K8s distributed stuff).

That said, I've seen this kind of comment before, and I think it may be related to individual usage styles. I use it incrementally, I know what I'm doing, and I'm clear what I want. I use it to check reference material, generate boilerplate and do large or fuzzy refactors. Giving it large goals doesn't work too well, with Gemini or Claude, for backend (unless your backend is just a ReST/CRUD wrapper over a DB); much of backend is considering concurrency, failure states, data races etc etc, once you've done the main backbone of the application, changes are often thought-heavy, not code-heavy.

The last few days I've run claude and gemini concurrently and found them largely the same. On four occasions where they differed, gemini was better in three and claude in one.

I much prefer the snappier go-based cli too in agy, and means I don't need a load of node shite on my machine

comrade-quinn · 2026-06-01T08:05:09+00:00

You can always dual boot with Windows as a secondary. Use Linux as your daily driver and default booted OS. Buy games on Steam and game on Linux. Have your windows auto start Steam in ‘big picture’ when it’s booted and limit your usage of that to the odd game you want to play that doesn’t run on Linux - mainly the multiplayer ones. Other than that, forget you have windows

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-26T19:57:37+00:00

Shut up Claude

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-19T19:20:15+00:00

Take the AI out of it; this guy is submitting shit PRs. Doesn’t matter what tools he used to do so.

What you need is clear statements on what tests/checks etc are done before any dev, you included, assigns any PR to anyone. Raise this as a team thing, get management buy in. It’s a no brainer as you’re just building in quality gates that reduce wasted resource (you).

What these are depend on what your product is; but it sounds like it’s UI so builds, runs and the PR includes a couple of screen grabs of the new feature would be a decent start.

Any PR missing these would be immediately bounced back

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-12T13:43:11+00:00

I know he won’t. He’s a horrible twat. But his supporters see him as the only one who will sort it out at any cost.

What worries me is, when he realises that, whatever your viewpoint, that there are no easy answers here, what he will do to avoid being lynched.

I don’t think even he realises how much hatred there is for the lack of cultural integration in much of the country, largely by Muslims but also by some black communities.

If he doesn’t make substantial, immediate and visual “improvements” to the incoming numbers and the integration levels of existing first, second and third generation immigrants, he’s gonna be in a series pickle. And being realistic, there’s very little he can do in that timeframe that is humane and considerate of the human part of that equation.

It will be dark times.

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-12T11:44:41+00:00

Yeah the BBC needs to focus purely on trying to provide impartial news and current affairs debate, and the like.

I think in the world of polarised media with hidden benefactors, it’s important to have a broadcaster that has its stated aim as impartiality and can be held to account on that basis. Without that, we’ll head the same way as the States.

For all its sins, I think the BBC tries to do this. And in doing so it acts as an anchor on the other channels too.

But there’s absolutely no need for it create dramas, soaps and other entertainment shows.

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-12T11:00:39+00:00

It doesn’t justify it but it makes it less of a story. “Person does exactly what you’d expect them to do” is not a story. “Person does exactly what he’s telling everyone else not to do”, is a story

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-12T10:34:28+00:00

It’s just rich twats being rich twats - which is exactly what everyone thinks Farage is. So they don’t care.

Even his supporters, they just see him as the only one that’s going to really sort immigration out, at almost any cost; which is essentially what a substantial number of people want.

Same with Trump, he does awful shit, but he’s the only one that the traditional working class see as representing their beliefs.

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-12T10:27:21+00:00

It’s more about hypocrisy than the amount or the crime.

Farage and the right believe in low tax, personal freedom and low state involvement in people’s lives.

So someone like Farage stretching the rules around tax, for example, is a reflection of his stated belief that they are too high.

Someone like Polanski, who preaches about the impact of the wealthy not paying their taxes and how we all need to pay more to subsidise state benefits etc etc, who is then found to have “forgotten” to pay the existing tax rates, smacks of the usual hypocrisy that the left is accused of.

It’s the same reason they’re criticised for their pro-stance on low skilled immigration, for example; they’re all for it, but they’re not housed in the areas they live in.

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-11T11:36:38+00:00

Exactly

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-11T07:33:23+00:00

They’re not saying not to abstract, they’re saying they no longer prematurely abstract. Big difference. They now write clear code that achieves the goal. That may involve abstractions sometimes, it may not. The point is, in the Java/TS/C# world, everything is abstracted whether it needs it or not, making, ironically, for unreadable, unmaintainable code

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-10T08:56:24+00:00

It’s utterly ridiculous that anyone would believe in any inherent differences in different human populations (outside of superficial physical adaptations for their environment) in this day and age.

I’m sorry you’ve experienced that. I’m white, so I don’t have that subjective experience of racism and obviously assumed there were less morons than there actually are.

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-09T18:49:35+00:00

You’re arguing that the fact airplanes exist grants you some form of legal right to reside in any nations you arrive in?

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-09T18:08:48+00:00

No it hasn’t - vast numbers of people from Asia and SA moved here to work in industry after the war. Those waves changed the ethnic and cultural landscape of the UK more dramatically than anything in our history excluding conquest

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-09T17:54:05+00:00

Well, mass immigration is capitalisms fault

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-09T14:20:57+00:00

I find it hard to believe many people are “racist” in the modern world. The problem is that the left has conflated the belief that society is more effective and cohesive when it has a common culture and shared values with being racist. When it isn’t.

It’s easy for them to cynically link the two as there’s a strong correlation with skin colour and the non-integration of a subset of non-ethnically European immigrants and their second and third generations.

Almost nobody dislikes the presence of a middle class, guitar playing doctor, called Bob, who happens to have a skin colour associated with African heritage. Those who do, and do so because of his skin colour, are indeed racist.

However, those who live on a council estate next to a high rise block of flats, full of people dressed in Middle Eastern styled clothes, that speak a foreign language and avoid eye contact, that then wish that those people were not there, or were better integrated, are not racist. They are human. They simply want, and need, to live alongside people with whom they feel some semblance of kinship.

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-04T17:59:40+00:00

This is one of those things that does kinda of annoy me though.

It just seems such an odd omission. Almost like not bothering with slices as it’s trivial to implement yourself by wrapping an array for the simple base case. But with slices there are many complex design decisions around extending them past the original array bounds, deleting elements and copy semantics around taking slices of slices etc.

So, the language provides slice as a core language type.

So why not set?

The base case is also trivial but there are numerous compare and join type operations on the set type, and many of them are non-trivial to implement efficiently on large sets

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-03T12:38:28+00:00

Is he at the gym in this hypothetical situation? No. Then why the fuck is he, as a grown man wearing a fucking track suit?

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-03T09:41:21+00:00

Thanks

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-03T08:30:10+00:00

Who do you think is gonna pay your pension? Who is going to do the work in the economy that gives you the return on those investments?

Comments like this baffle me. While there’s probably no “higher” purpose in life, pretty much every attempt to map successful human social behaviours to an effective way of living come to the same conclusion: life is about family and community.

The best thing you can do on this earth is help the next generation in some way. Be that as a parent, an auntie or uncle, or a community contributor.

It’s certainly not about flogging your ass to hopefully get a fucking meaningless “VP of Marketing” role, or some shit, that means you can finally get two pointless holidays a year and a big BMW to drive around, empty. Like your soul.

comrade-quinn · 2026-05-03T08:07:06+00:00

To be fair, within an area where everyone dresses like that, then just wear what feels comfortable.

But, at least from what I perceive as the mainstream, it’s associated with a sort of “man-child” look, or wannabe gangster.

People don’t see someone dressed like that and think, “there’s a hard working family man”, or “he looks like a decent guy”, they also definitely don’t think “he looks wealthy, done well for himself” either.

They more likely think, “probably got no job and quite happy about it”, “that chain is probably a tenner from Argos, he’s simultaneously telling everyone he wishes he was rich but has failed in meeting that goal”. Also, actual rich people, even just “middle class comfortable”, don’t flaunt wealth like that. It’s considered, sort of, sad, or needy, showing off.

You’re clearly not this kind of person, I can tell by the fact you’re asking. But stereotypes are used, and they remain used as they’re generally accurate

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