back

by softwaredoug·23d ago·view on hn ↗
This effort makes me think of the tick-tock oscillation between features and code stewardship I’ve experienced on every agent heavy coding project

Tick: go hard after features, build a correct and extremely messy version

Tock: digest what was done, deslopify, improve project aspects that go beyond feature correctness: performance, maintainability, general fragility / sensitivity to change

My experience is spending a day vibe coding a working application. Then a week unslopifying it to make it a viable software project that can sustainably accept more features without the house of cards collapsing.

You sort of did this pre-AI, but then the professional human coder had a stronger mental model of the system, and IMO was going slower that the switch from tick to tock wasn’t as jarring

2 comments
> You sort of did this pre-AI

No, I did the opposite. First refactor the code base to make a new feature fit naturally in it later on. Then hopefully the new feature is easy to implement cleanly and correctly first time. The only times I’ve had to go back and do things again “properly” was when the feature itself was not designed properly or didn’t fit at all even after I tried to adapt it to fit which happens rarely, and mostly for experimental things that no one knows exactly how they should work.

I think the only solution is to actually look at the code and ensure that it's not just duplicating logic all over the place and is actually maintainable. Coding models love taking shortcuts to break encapsulation or duplicating things that shouldn't be duplicated.