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codeinabox

@ codeinabox @programming.dev

Posts
325
Comments
75
Joined
10 mo. ago

London based software development consultant

  • FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter

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  • As the author notes, it is very impressive what generative AI can produce these days.

    The frontier of what the LLMs can do has moved since the last time I tried to vibe-code something. I didn’t expect to have a working interpreter the same day I dreamt of a new programming language. It now seems possible.

    However, as they point out, there's definitely downsides to this approach.

    The downside of vibe coding the whole interpreter is that I have zero knowledge of the code. I only interacted with the agent by telling it to implement a thing and write tests for it, and I only really reviewed the tests. I reckon this would be an issue in the future when I want to manually make some change in the actual code, because I have no familiarity with it.

  • Programming Languages in the Age of AI Agents

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  • What about developers who are required to use AI as part of their job?

  • Pull Request Templates

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  • I know what you mean. Quite often when I've worked in a project where there is a pull request template, a lot of the time people don't bother to fill it out. However, in an ideal world, people would be proud of the work that they've delivered, and take the time to describe the changes when raising a pull request.

  • Serverless Is An Architectural Handicap (And I'm Tired of Pretending it Isn't)

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  • I'm not an architect, but I do dislike how much of development work has AWS wrangling, dealing with the architectural hoops that are mentioned in the article

  • Octoverse: A new developer joins GitHub every second as AI leads TypeScript to #1

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  • 'AI' Sucks the Joy Out of Programming

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  • Back in the day, I used CakePHP to build websites, and it had a tool that could "bake" all the boilerplate code.

    You could use a snippet engine or templates with your editor, but unless you get a lot of reuse out of them, it's probably easier and quicker to use an LLM for the boilerplate.

  • Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews

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  • I also make use of ‘⚠’ to mark significant/blocking comments and bullet points. Other labels, like or similar to conventional comment prefixes, like “thought:” or “note:”, can indicate other priorities and significance of comments.

    Thank you for introducing me to conventional comments! I hadn't heard of them before, and I can see how they'd be really useful, particularly in a neurodiverse team.

  • AI and the age of probabilistic programming

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  • How does one measure code quality? I'm a big advocate of linting, and have used rules including cyclomatic complexity, but is that, or tools such as SonarQube, an effective measure of quality? You can code that passes those checks, but what if it doesn't address the acceptance criteria - is it still quality code then?

  • I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong

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  • The author does make some good points about colours as visual cues, instead of just making things look colourful. I have to admit prior to reading this post, I always picked my themes on aesthetics, but it has made me think about colour as utility.

  • Comprehension Debt: The Ticking Time Bomb of LLM-Generated Code

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  • Exactly but generative AI has exacerbated the problem

    What is new is the scale of the problem being created as lightning-speed code generators spew reams of unread code into millions of projects

  • If Releases Are Experiments, What’s Your Hypothesis?

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  • My understanding is that an example of a hypothesis, is that users want a feature. The experiment is putting that feature in front of users, or performing user research, which which then allows you to validate if a hypothesis is true or not.

  • If Releases Are Experiments, What’s Your Hypothesis?

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  • I am intrigued. Could you elaborate on this with some examples?

  • Implementing Conventional Commits with Jira Ticket Prefix Validation

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  • After a bit of experimentation, I've managed to find a cleaner solution to enforcing the ticket number in the subject:

     
        
module.exports = {
  extends: ['@commitlint/config-conventional'],
  rules: {
    // Enforce scope to match JIRA ticket format like PER-123
    'jira-ticket-rule': [2, 'always'],
    'subject-case': [0],
  },
  plugins: [
    {
      rules: {
        'jira-ticket-rule': ({ subject }) => {
          return [
             subject && subject.match(/[A-Z]+-\d+/),
            'Your subject should contain a JIRA ticket eg PER-123',
          ];
        },
      },
    },
  ],
};

  • How to get started as a freelancer?

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  • To clarify, when you say freelancer, do you mean on a part-time basis? Or do you mean having a contract and working on a full-time basis for that client? Also, where are you based? I'm happy to give advice as a UK based contractor, who does a tiny bit of freelance work