Write code like a human will maintain it

I run various forms of workflows to run dedicated QA, code review (of various flavors) simplification and text simplification agents. Especially the simplification goes a long way to remove dumb padding, duplication and efficiency. Dedicated docs/comment simplification is also becoming more and more necessary on recent models. For things like feature development in my workflow, the majority of time the agents run and tokens spent is critiquing the code from various perspectives and it's not close.

Of course, this doesn't solve the overall issue that agents don't write code like you and still requires a lot of human attention in planning and code review out to clean up leftover issues, and e.g. challenge bad assumptions about architecture and real-world context. A human is still very much needed to cull the slop (or, more gratuitously: align the agent). But IME it does help avoid a lot of pitfalls and makes the code high quality a lot more quickly.

I'm not sure this guy is using the same LLMs as we do. A small AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md easily prevents issues like that.

Have a bit of a contrarian view on this tl;dr don’t write code for human consumption if you use AI; BUT you have to accept AI coding lock in and change how you work.

Funny enough, discussed this yesterday

Stop Optimizing Code for Humans https://youtube.com/live/eLn4-XA-KdQ?feature=share

I absolutely will not write corporate code like humans are maintaining it anymore, because I don’t have any confidence actual humans will be maintaining it.

For personal projects, I can trust that I myself will be maintaining things so I still write things like it matters, but I do not extend the trust to others.

Yawn. So people are discovering SWE hasn’t actually changed in its basic principles. Is this going to be the new “how I use LLMs” article? Good night

SOLID is a good idea that most coders I know don’t follow because they can’t be arsed. Turns out AI is really good at writing SOLID code (if you tell it to) and SOLID code is much easier for AI to reason about.

Just run weekly cron job to assess code quality and highlight candidates for refactoring. In addition to doing the same in each PR, of course, but things can get through.

this article according to pangram was AI generated, ironic

my LLM does this pretty well with my coaching. i use a good model and i encourage it to make such improvements. and since the llm is trained on human maintainers it works fine.

linting tools, static analysis, CPD, etc. These are all old things you can continue to use and are much more robust than anything you can prompt. These should be standard when using LLMs. In fact, you can tighten the rules even more enforcing more restrictions so you ONLY get the output you want. put this behind a pre-commit hook and a CI job that runs on a PR, and it will work wonders.

You can have all the prompts you want on top of this, but if you don't have this automated stuff running behind the scenes, you aren't serious about these issues.

Looking through some of these comments here, I see lots of people rewriting concrete rules in markdown willing to spend tokens on the hope AI won't miss it where an actual program won't.

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. Code for readability.

— John F. Woods (1991)

AI isnt taking my job. my company is supporting local AI for development. who ever comes after me will have the same hardware and models or better. unless a MBA is put in charge, my boss and predecessors can maintain and build out as needed.

bottom up AI use seems a godsend compared to the corporate AI rat race.

i setup some slop reporting systems and ensured my boss knows theyre great starting points but serious use requires real time investment.

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And hope it works?

I’m pretty sure many people who use AI to write emails or blog posts add "make it sound like a human wrote it" to their prompts. We all know what the result usually looks like.

If AI is writing my code, I'd rather have it focus purely on correctness and efficiency than on making the code easy to read.

heck! I might even ask it to imitate Arthur Whitney’s style.

/s

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u right