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points by prmph 4 days ago | 0 comments
What a weird comment.

First, you question the model. I have reams and reams of conversations with Opus 5.5 that shows it makes architectural messes all the time

And then you are saying you needed to have performance tests (which many devs don't even bother with) to catch bad architecture?? lol

So what if the architectural problem is not one that would be caught with a performance test? It seems you lack imagination to think of all the ton of issues that that would be very complicated to catch with tests.

[–] user43928 4 days ago
Opus 5.5 is not normally copying the whole database to update a single row for no reason, and without mentioning a workaround. It's simply not my experience, and I don't think there is anything weird about me saying so.

I don't think I commented on performance tests at all.

Maybe I lack imagination here, yes, but generally I go by experience rather than talking about imagined issues. That is precisely what many here seem to do when it comes to explaining why AI couldn't work for them, and why reviewing the code remains necessary.

[–] prmph 4 days ago
See this basic architectural smell Claude Opus 5.5 produced just minutes ago:

Me: Why this:

> I'm adding a lookup to persistEphemeralVFolder so that a repeated search reuses the user's root vFolder with the same query instead of hitting the unique index.

Claude Opus 5.5: A search stores its query as an ephemeral root vFolder. The new unique index on (user, parent query, query) now rejects a second root vFolder with the same query. As written, persistEphemeralVFolder always inserts, so repeating a search would fail its insert, the retry with a fresh short code would fail too, and the search would return an error. The Ephemeral VFolder paragraph we rewrote in the SPECS also says a search reuses the existing vFolder with its query, so the user gets the same short code back.

The lookup I proposed would also copy the query-then-create logic already in the PUT /vfolders handler. A cleaner option is one shared engine function that finds or creates a vFolder by query, called by both the handler and persistEphemeralVFolder. Shall I do that, or keep the local lookup?

Churned for 6s · done 1:10 PM

Me: I mean, is it not cleaner to fix this: "persistEphemeralVFolder always insert"

And generally, we want the db and its indexes to do their work, not duplicating that in application code with pre-lookups and stuff

Claude Opus 5.5: You're right. Both persistEphemeralVFolder and the lookup I put in the PUT /vfolders handler should be replaced by a save with conflict keys (user, parent query, query), so the unique index decides whether a row is created or updated.

[–] user43928 3 days ago
What you're showing here seems to be a suboptimal choice being propagated, but with likely no practical impact at all if you kept the lookup.
[–] Arkhaine_kupo 4 days ago
> And then you are saying you needed to have performance tests (which many devs don't even bother with) to catch bad architecture?? lol

if the cost of writing code collapses, what are the barriers to including these kind of tests?

It seems like the flow and work when using LLMs has to change, spend longer on the plan, spend more time on defensive testing, have more comprehensive tests (input validation, cybersecurity, performance, data hygine) and less time on functionality

if you want to write code the old way where the architecture is human readable and the tests are an after thought, then thats on you if you then ignore the part where the human has to read it.

TLDR: either go full agent, or actually learn the code being produced, but not both.