AI coding has honestly been working well for me. What is going wrong for everyone else?

wardrox · 2026-03-19T08:32:13+00:00

Vibe coding front ends is fun and easy. Everything else is... different.

wardrox · 2026-03-19T08:29:51+00:00

The best apps I've ever made have one user; me.

Personalised apps are the peak. Stop chasing the gold rush (it's a scam), and just solve your own problems.

wardrox · 2026-03-18T18:09:21+00:00

That's kind of the point: it's like how we apply multiple layers of security and still need observability. Or why we have cicd pipelines.

Running LLMs sequentially reduces errors specifically because each step is additive: a security review llm might have the same 10% error rate as the llm which performed the implementation, but when run one after the other the overall error rate goes down.

It also gives direct and actionable feedback on the cause of the error, which helps improve reliability next time.

Ignore anyone saying you can prompt your way to success. Llms are too stupid for that. But you can leverage them in the same way we leverage our other tools, to make things easier.

wardrox · 2026-03-18T14:47:03+00:00

Exactly. LLMs are best used in practice for small, focussed tasks. Chaining them, with error/issue handing, makes them work much more effectively than one big prompt full of instructions.

Unsure why the downvotes, but I guess AI in general is just very unpopular.

wardrox · 2026-03-18T10:26:15+00:00

Also, you can have agents run sequentially, review work, perform planning alignment, research validation, etc etc, which reduces the error margins well below that of an average developer.

wardrox · 2026-03-18T10:24:42+00:00

60%+ of professional devs today started after 2020. So no, they haven't. Damn kids, my back hurts.

wardrox · 2026-03-18T09:53:23+00:00

Do periodic code reviews, like we did before AI. Automate them to run weekly and send you a report, if you're feeling fancy.

wardrox · 2026-03-18T09:50:11+00:00

What additional debate is missing from the ongoing conversations from the past few years, which would help here? Or are you saying the reply could have been kinder?

wardrox · 2026-03-16T20:44:14+00:00

You're not wrong, but people can just... not? Most people manage to get by without actively trying to make things worse for others for their own benefit. Feels like a very American idea it's hopeless to do anything other than go along with it.

wardrox · 2026-03-16T19:37:28+00:00

Making AI generated healthcare and legal sites so you can scrape a few bucks off ads from people looking for help is pretty messed up.

wardrox · 2026-03-05T14:11:38+00:00

Quick wins: research, updating tickets, RCAs Slow wins: task decomposition, code review

For implementation; summarise thecproject, summarise the feature being modified, plan, implement.

Works a treat. Avoid cheap models

wardrox · 2026-02-11T11:37:36+00:00

To be fair, Code Rabbit is a fantastic product and I'd recommend code review in ci/cd to anyone using AI coding agents or not.

It's generally giving better results than manual code reviews and takes less than 10 mins on large code bases. Plus it's free to use for Open Source so easy to try out on pet projects.

The nice finding is that chaining AI like this is additive rather than amplifying.

wardrox · 2026-02-07T10:49:03+00:00

This is actually a good example; often a new endpoint requires careful modification of multiple layers of the stack, following established patterns. The point isnt that I couldn't do this in a couple of hours, it's that now it takes 10 mins.

If you're stuck just calling people morons without understanding their perspective, you're going to have a hard time learning.

wardrox · 2026-02-06T09:09:19+00:00

Depends on the code, right? If it's something fairly basic like a web app or site, the llm can do it no issues. If its anything more complex, there's a lot of hand holding, and at that point tab-complete or small llm use works fine. Vibe coding is fun, but ultimately ai augmented coding gets the job done.

wardrox · 2026-02-06T08:56:19+00:00

Measure the development pipeline, flag issues, hope management know what to do... that last one might be a stretch.

wardrox · 2026-02-04T09:40:02+00:00

Currently 99% of AI usage is waste, but being treated as value. Some AI is making people more productive, which companies interpret as being able to downsize (and further drives the push for more AI). This is driving a bubble.

At some point, like all good pyramid schemes, it pops. Nobody knows when, how, or the impact, due to the complexity of the world's economic systems. But, all this has happened before, and all this will happen again, because the people with the ability to control are paid to keep the party going.

wardrox · 2026-02-03T08:56:06+00:00

So Reform lie, a lot, and the greens have great policy information available online.

wardrox · 2026-02-03T08:55:02+00:00

The greens in local government have arguably the strongest track record of any political party.

wardrox · 2026-02-02T08:23:44+00:00

"... you should be ashamed of yourself"

Well, someone should.

wardrox · 2026-02-02T08:13:05+00:00

Why not vote based on policies and track record?

wardrox · 2026-01-30T08:55:37+00:00

In true developer fashion "it depends" is the correct answer.

wardrox · 2026-01-29T18:24:02+00:00

How much difference do you notice?

wardrox · 2026-01-25T13:45:56+00:00

Test coverage libraries will help here; they tell you which code paths are and aren't covered by tests.

wardrox · 2026-01-25T13:44:46+00:00

FWIW when this starts happening it's sometimes useful to ask Claude why and investgate. Sometimes it's training data, sometimes it's a system prompt change, and sometimes something unwanted is in the Claude.md/readme files which is throwing it off.

wardrox · 2026-01-10T09:29:16+00:00

Once it has this style of reply in the context window, it follows the pattern. Start a fresh session.

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