undefined

points

[-]

Totally fair, but 42 if-statements across 32 files isn't something you need to fix with like ... a grand refactor or hexagonal architecture or event sourcing or whatever the overengineering pattern du jour is. You can fix that with a utility function or three, and a file/class/module/whatever that owns the code relating to some of those conditions.

I'm not some DRY zealot, but I've been in the "this system needs really similar changes to a ton of geographically distant code for simple changes" salt mines a lot. The people who say that kind of spaghetti is unavoidable are just as wrong as the ones who say it can only be fixed with a grand rearchitecture by a rockstar.

by Pannoniae11 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Sure but even wiring that utility function in is work :D If you have even just a 2-3-million LoC codebase, not even something truly enormous - making global changes does require typing, and a whole lot of it...

by cess1112 minutes ago|

parent|

[-]

Such repetitions can regularly be deterministically automated, like find -exec sed and similar medium level tools.

If you spend a lot of time performing monotonic tasks, then your organisation needs to delete and refactor for a while until change in 'hot' areas of the code base are easy to make. Reaching for some code synthesis SaaS to paper it over will worsen the problem and should result in excommunication from the guild.

by reverius427 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

If you have a codebase that big, can you even fit enough of it into a context window for the LLM to make correct and meaningful changes across all of it? Admittedly I've only used LLM-based coding for smaller projects.

by Pannoniae2 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

All of it hell no :D But just with any things, you break things down into subtasks. Then you break it down even more. You as a human don't hold all that stuff in your head either, so why would an LLM?

My current codebase is ~3 million LoC all in all (not greenfield, really old code), working on it by myself, the complexity is definitely manageable between Claude and me :)

by jimbokun9 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

LLMs are great at replacing repetition with an abstraction.