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by threecheese11 hours ago |
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upvoteby rsanheim10 hours ago|
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"seam" dates back to refactoring & software engineering literature that pre-date LLM use by 20 years -- see Working Effectively With Legacy Code for one example (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/working-effectively-wit...). Its a great book, still use techniques from it everyday.

"load-bearing" I have never heard used for programming before Opus, and its incredibly annoying and over-used.

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upvoteby chucksmash6 hours ago|
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+1, useful read!

Seam is used liberally throughout because it captures the idea well (i.e. a place where you can cleave ball of mud code apart to begin refactoring efforts in an isolated way) and that takes many different forms throughout the book whether that be via methods and classes, source files as a single unit, linker seams, on and on.

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upvoteby thewebguyd10 hours ago|
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load-bearing was/is used frequently on the ops side of things, I assume the LLMs picked up from physical engineering texts or sysadmin type blogs.
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upvoteby Sharlin7 hours ago|
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"Load-bearing" is an apt metaphor in the https://xkcd.com/2347/ sense.
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upvoteby bombcar2 hours ago|
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I take it in a get-ye-flask mode.

http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Ye_Flask

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upvoteby SoftTalker5 hours ago|
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I remember "cleavage" and "cleaves" from that vocabulary. Always made my adolescent brain chuckle.
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upvoteby chmod7755 hours ago|
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"seam" is a cop-out term for when someone (usually AI) lacks the imagination to come up with something more descriptive. It's like saying "middle thing". Just name it by what it does, and if you can't, remove it because it's not doing anything.

"load-bearing" on the other hand is just a weird way to say "required" or "prerequisite" without drawing any attention to the fact that one cannot articulate what something is a prerequisite for, probably because that fact has since been lost from context.

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upvoteby stackghost2 hours ago|
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"Seam" has been a thing since before the AI craze. Wasn't it the NSA director who once said something like "we make our living at the seams"?
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upvoteby QuercusMax10 hours ago|
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I believe the term "seam" came from Michael Feathers' "Working Effectively with Legacy Code": “a seam is a place where you can alter behavior in your program without editing in that place”.

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/LegacySeam.html

Claude is using it a bit liberally, but not totally incorrectly.

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upvoteby Sharlin7 hours ago|
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I've associated it with the concept of "carving nature at the seams", except that I just realized that in the standard phrasing it's actually "at the joints", not "seams".
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upvoteby 5 hours ago|
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