I've wrote a rather large system that runs a medium business, solo. When a bug pops up, I feel unfamiliar with the code. It was all written by hand with 0 LLM usage.
It is normal to feel this way. However, I am still very capable of resolving the issues in a timely manner. Adding any new big features is a big undertaking and usually involves a lot of refactoring to fix the dumb decisions I've made.
I have this feeling whenever I read my own (no llm) code that I wrote 6 months ago. Sometimes a couple of weeks is enough to feel alienated from my own, well considered code, that I spent a lot of time crafting with love.
That is why I try to make good, high level descriptions of what is going on at several levels of a project. Funny thing is, I just kept on doing this with llms, using AGENTS.md at almost any subdir of a project. It works for me, and it seems to work for the llms too.
I'm looking for a contractor to do my concrete. 2 companies had AI agents. Instant no thank you, I'm just going to go with a guy that still answers his phone.
I try to warn my small business clients who ask for this.
You know those annoying AI bots the big companies use?
Well yours will be worse because you don't have their budget and it will drive what few customers who stumble upon your site away instantly.
Your own authentic voice answering a customer query directly is one of the few advantages a small business has over the big guys.
Not to mention liability if the agent says something misleading. You won't be able to afford the lawyers the big guys can to get yourself off the hook.
This is something I've thought about as people complain about things like restaurant photos being AI and such. You know what kind of customer this pushes away? The kind that complain about minor details that don't really matter. Might be a net good for many businesses.
To the people who are saying these little details aren't an indicator of what matters:
As a chef of close to a decade I will tell you right now:
If people in the restaurant aren't getting small details right...
They DEFINITELY aren't getting the rest right either
Someone who isn't paying attention to the food they're serving and the conditions they're serving it in just doesn't care and isn't paying attention to how they wash their hands or that piece of meat they dropped behind the fridge a few days ago that's bringing in roaches and rodents or the sour smell coming from the bag they just opened or the open wound that just dripped blood into your sauce
Most likely, they probably don't even know what allergens are present in their menu, posing a genuine risk to people
I promise you
Who are you people sticking up for?
I don't understand the "I mean they clearly didn't put any effort in here, but I believe 100% that they're doing their absolute best everywhere else!" sentiment
It's great to be optimistic about life and people in general but that's entirely unreasonable and you're only gonna be let down (or in the case of a restaurant probably get sick)
Would you trust a pilot that advertises his services with some half assed ai generated ad with spelling mistakes?
There's a great episode from the Search Engine podcast about this. The gist is that it takes a lot of concerted effort to make something great, otherwise it will probably suck. The host got interested in a restaurant that seemed obsessive about doing things well and talked to the owner about it. The episode title is "How to pursue excellence ... in noodles".
Alternatively: if you're wasting a bunch of your time on the minor details how do you have enough time for the major ones? I'd much rather my restaurant owner worry about sourcing ingredients, keeping the kitchen clean, improving the taste of the food than anything else.
If you don't have the time or money to have actual menu photos taken, what are the odds you have the time and money to source high quality ingredients, keep the kitchen clean, or improve the taste of the food?
The minor details are precisely the ones that require the least time and money to handle, so if those are being skimped on, it's likely that the major details are too, in my experience.
It depends, probably. If we are talking about high end, off the beaten path places, marketing is important. For the $1.50 slice pizza at the hole in the wall in Times Square? I doubt those places are cleaned and no one is checking the reviews, people just line up because others are, and because the smell and taste is right.
Hell yeah I will ship you a box of ‘food’ for two hundred dollars. You know it’s going to be great because I don’t spend my time on stuff like describing or photographing it
Where are you located? In the Northeast US, we're finding getting a contractor who is both good and has availability is quite an ordeal, involving significant delays.
Do they really? Are there any numbers available to support this? Sample size of one, but my brother is in that field, and it's been their and their subcontractors' slowest year in a long while.
I recently went contractor hunting and everyone was too busy and ignoring me. I did find one eventually but it took 5 days of calling 5-10 shops a day. How is your brother not also swamped with work?
Maybe tell him to get a sticker for the back of his truck and make sure he has a Google map listing with 2 photos of his work and a very basic website?
Both you and I are, like I said, a sample size of one. You're drawing conclusions generalizing your 5 day experience looking for one type of work to an entire industry. He may not be in the same field you were looking for, or a different geographic reality. I also didn't say they weren't swamped with work, their schedule is full regardless, but that it's the lowest demand they've seen in a while.
Yep. I had a recurring contract with a local service company that got bought out by a larger one. Old company had an email that I could message and immediately get a useful reply back from a human. New ownership got rid of that, and their website messaging didn't work. The only way to contact them was to call on the phone.
Who is the phone answered by? A crappy AI voice bot. Getting past that wasted a bunch of my time, followed by talking to person who was useless. Then I finally got through to someone who could actually do something for me. At that point the only help I wanted was to immediately close my account and never do business with them again.
I've posted several reviews recently on Google, rating the company 1 star and warning that they're customer support is using AI agents that are unhelpful and try to waste your time. The other crazy thing is restaurants who use AI generated pictures in their marketing. Instant yuck.
On the other hand, I am also looking for a contractor to do my concrete. I hate the whole process, I hate calling people only to spend 5 minutes trying to explain what I want and then they don’t provide that service or try to convince me to do something else, and then seeing bids and not really understanding what things are important and if I am getting a good price.
I would love for an agent to just be able to handle all this for me. Find me a good, fair price from a reliable contractor who understands what I want. I don’t want to have to call a bunch of people, just do it for me.
I tried seeing if an agent could help me with this, but it isn’t quite there yet. It did a good job helping me figure out what I really wanted, but not the rest of it.
I got quotes first which was the wrong approach. I ended up taking photos and detailing what I want on plat of survey. I also consulted a structural engineer(for garage cracks) and researched using rebar, fiber mesh, and metal mesh.
So, basically I know what I want and it is easier to get quotes this way. I just send the docs and dimensions.
Well, now I have the same problem I had before, how do I find a good structural engineer, and what is a fair price to pay them? Do I have to call a bunch and do the same thing I hated doing for the contractors?
I would call 4 local structural engineers to you. Ask about price. Inspection and report is about $700-$2000. You just go with someone who feels right for you. Still cheaper than $40k concrete job, so not as much of a deal.
There are some businesses I don't want to contact anyone.
when finding an emergency plumber or a tow truck, it seems all the companies you can contact are just scummy intermediaries that call a normal business and take a cut.
I added emergency road service to my car insurance just so I wouldn't have to search for a tow company myself.
Its annoying because thats what people want from small business but as a contractor you're usually working so you have to do your trade and be available to take calls like a receptionist. Better if they'd just send an email or use the online booking form.
I'm open to leaving voicemails. If I hear "hello, this is Bob from Bob's Concrete, I'm on a job leave a detailed message and I will get back to you", that guy is likely to get my job, even if he is a bit more.
Yeah, same. I realized for the most part, using the internet isn't worth it anymore. I was using it out of inertia and thinking it offered convenience. Realistically, that convenience isn't there anymore. As others mentioned, I also started reading a lot more books, I meet with people, I always phone call instead of messaging, I also attend talks (local universities are great) and go to museums, etc.
Honestly the golden era ended around 2010, once the normies showed up en-mass for social media. The late 90s and early 2000s were so much fun on the internet, and I'll always be sad that today's nerdy teenagers won't get to experience that.
I have a few ideas for my own retro internet projects but I'm making sure I can protect them from the AI scourge first, or at least do my best to.
Bit too early for me unfortunately, I was 6/7 then! I was still having a lot of fun up until about 2005, before I went off to university. The past week I've been trawling the Internet Archive to try and find things I vaguely remember - it's remarkably hard. So much of that era is missing, though thankfully one of my own sites was indexed and I'm able to fan out a bit from there. Albeit mostly to French anime fansites, but I'll take it.
1993 Was where the internet was still niche that barely any content existed outside of chats.
Up to the social media era was a nice intersection between a good amount of content, good quality, and enough people to where you could legitimately find a community for almost any niche.
I stopped reading papers, journals, blog/internet posts, books, etc written after 2022 unless lots of people repost it as high quality (and even then i take caution because how do i know it is not agents just lauding random things in convergence?).
My time reading older (e-)books has skyrocketed.
I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news.
I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos made after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it.
I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.
I think the key is that AI is a spectrum. A writer using AI could mean anything from spelling/grammar fixes to full-on generating whole-cloth works. I'm hoping we kind of settle in on some sort of accepted standard or at least disclosure method.
But who knows -- I've been hoping we settle on accepted social norms for smartphones and social media and we're still not quite there yet either. Hell, if anything that seems to have taken a turn for the WORSE in the past few years.
I'm with you on the YouTube side - I stopped making my own videos earlier this year when I burnt out, and now I'm finding myself increasingly irritated just by the thumbnails when I visit the site. I'm definitely viewing less than I did last year.
I hadn't considered the impact on manga. Machine translations are probably helping with fan translations for more niche projects. I haven't seen any obvious AI art myself yet but I do tend to read stuff from smaller creators on slower release cycles.
I cowboyed a lot of projects, then 2 years later a feature is not working as expected. It is.
Good docs, signed off by stake holders is essential. It basically covers you the dev, and confirms everyone involved agrees on what the software will do in certain situations.
I encountered bugs created by AI. No matter how many times it tried it could not fix the bug, it was introducing so much slop to work around the issue.
I finally gave up and read documentation for 15 minutes and solved the problem.
I will never push AI generated code to production without understanding it, and this is why I only generate small code snippets and copy/paste most of the time.
Writing code at enterprise level is insanely difficult. You are constrained by budget, staff, legacy databases/environments, business rules hiding all over the place, and people.
You can't just rewrite everything. So over many years people are touching small parts of the pie.
Yeah, enterprise code has that trope of being enterprise-y, verbose and bad. In my experience, that has always been the opposite. At the big corps/FAANGs I worked at, a single line of change can adversely impact millions of paying customers, so a lot of the verbosity and harnesses exists to dampen the failure modes.
Most of the terribly written stuff has always been at startups, where devs fling nearly anything across the finish line, if it barely works the happy path.
I have a blazor app in poduction, Codex made errors which it could not fix and it required me reading documentation. I won't argue that it didn't make my life simpler, tasks which would take me days are done in hours, sometimes without touching code.
Yea, i still deal with a ton of code in AI heavy workflows. If anything the frustrating part is absorbing the code quickly enough. AI (Claude for me) writes in cryptic text and the code flows can often be non-obvious.
I need (and am exploring) custom review tooling to improve this AI->Human code flow. Reviewing PRs were always the hardest part for me in programming. They were often full of the developers decisions and you have to rediscover those as you're reading code for it to make sense[1]. However i find this even more difficult to discover these decisions from AI.
However unlike human PRs we can ask more of AI. Rarely have i had a developer put on a presentation for a PR - but AI could right? AI could produce a guided walkthrough of the code. Not sure if it will help of course, but my thought is we're all stuck in the old "PR review flow" but instead of PRs it's AI - and the volume of them is far greater than anything prior. So i expect we need to tweak how we review, how we get information from LLMs.
[1]: I'm speaking generally, and about larger PRs. Not some small func where you can easily see what it does. Business logic and complex code can be difficult to decipher in PRs, imo.
I've wrote a rather large system that runs a medium business, solo. When a bug pops up, I feel unfamiliar with the code. It was all written by hand with 0 LLM usage.
It is normal to feel this way. However, I am still very capable of resolving the issues in a timely manner. Adding any new big features is a big undertaking and usually involves a lot of refactoring to fix the dumb decisions I've made.
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