Whenever I say I dislike debugging and organize my programming habits around avoiding it, there is always pushback: “You must not use a good debugger.” To summarize my view: I want my software to be antifragile (credit to Nassim Taleb for the concept). The longer I work on a codebase, the easier it should become … Continue reading Antifragile Programming and Why AI Won’t Steal Your Job
This is the thesis of this argument, and it’s completely unfounded. “AI can’t create antifragile code” Why not? Effective tests and debug time checks, at this point, come straight from claude without me even prompting for it. Even if you are rolling the code yourself, you can use AI to throw a hundred prompts at it asking “does this make sense? are there any flaws here? what remains untested or out of scope that I’m not considering?” like a juiced up static analyzer
Are you asking the author or people in general? If the author didn’t answer “why not” for you, then I can.
Yes, I’ve used Claude. Let’s skip that part.
If you don’t know how to write or identify defensive code, you can’t know if the LLM generated defensive code. So in order for a LLM to be trusted to generate defensive code, it needs to do so 100% of the time, or very close to that.
You seem to be under the impression that Claude does so, but you presumably can tell if code is written with sufficient guards and tests. You know to ask the LLM to evaluate and revise the code. Someone without experience will not know to ask that.
Speaking now from my experience, after using Claude for work to write tests, I came out of that project with no additional experience writing tests. I had to do another personal project after that to learn the testing library we used. Had that work project given me sufficient time to actually do the work, I’d have spent some time learning the testing library we used. That was unfortunately not the case.
The tests Claude generated were too rigid. It didn’t test important functionality of the software. It tested exact inputs/outputs using localized output values, meaning changing localizations was potentially enough to break tests. It tested cases that didn’t need to be tested, like whether certain dependency calls were done in a specific order (those calls were done in parallel anyway). It wrote some good tests, but a lot of additional tests that weren’t needed, and skipped some tests that were needed.
As a tool to help someone who already knows what they’re doing, it can be useful. It’s not a good tool for people who don’t know what they’re doing.