Hi Onni! Between frontend and backend, where would you consider yourself more experienced and where do you hold more opinions?

The topic you bring up reminds me of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, which is the idea that we see the flaws in things we’re intimately familiar with, but fail to identify issues on other areas and instead tend to take information as truth.

My experience has been getting good results intertwined with hair-pulling-throw-everything-away moments, across a broad spectrum of subjects and tasks.

The way I see it, each of our personal bar for what “success” means makes all the difference when coming out online to talk about our experiences.

In particular, designing user interfaces and thinking of the intended experience is something that I find more challenging to describe and set deterministic automated tests or conditions, specially when you don’t know what you’re looking for. It’s easy to become hostage to the vibes.

What LLMs have shown to be able to do with greater consistency is replicating existing patterns with adaptations. So, e.g., maintaining a vetted set of core UI components helps.

My experience has been the opposite. Very bad results on the BE but fine for whippping up some basic UI prototype (have not yet tried to let Claude loose on our very messy React FE).

We have just started experimenting with “AI driven development” and so far the results have been abysmal. I am much more BE focused and the code we get from Claude there has been straight up stupid out of the box at almost every level. Far far below what I’ve seen from juniors in quality, if not quantity. Lots of boneheaded mistakes like not being aware of default values, or figuring out on its own that there is a structure file that should let it know certain fields can’t be null etc. Also will construct some elaborate abstraction to add a missing piece of logic, when actually a single new pattern match clause can do the same thing (and various similar existing pieces are implemented that way). But by far the scariest is the high level stuff. For example, proposing to fix db pool timeouts by just arbitrarily imposing timeouts on random queries. That’s just what I’ve seen this week.

That said, I’m certain we are just not doing it right yet. What I seem to be hearing from everyone making a serious attempt at this is that there is a massive amount of configuration, context massaging, “prompt engineering” etc required to get good results from Claude. We are iterating on all of that but I am still very skeptical about the possibility of getting good code from these things yet. I guess I will know for sure when we inevitably bring in one of the coming wave of AI consultants and see if they can actually deliver acceptable results. My joke is that having “robot skills” is going to be the new “people skills” resume buff.

On a positive note, we integrated Claude in our PR review flow and it has been absolutely invaluable, catching a ton of stuff that regularly gets missed because people do not review things nearly as close as a robot is willing to do. And the occasional whiff is easy to just ignore so there’s very little downside compared to the actual development process.

Maybe my Claude was drunk but I have the same frontend skill and the stuff it produces is god awful.

Text with colour primary on a primary background. Elements with a border but no margin. Like somebody who learned html yesterday.

Must be a skill issue on my end.