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Comment by streetfighter64 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, all I can really say is... if writing some logging takes you one or two days, are you sure you _really_ know how to code?

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Ever worked on a distributed system with hundreds of millions of customers and seemingly endless business requirements?

Some things are complex.

You're right, you're better than me!

You could've been curious and ask why it would take 1-2 days, and I would've happily told you.

I'll bite, because it does seem like something that should be quick in a well-architected codebase. What was the situation? Was there something in this codebase that was especially suited to AI-development? Large amounts of duplication perhaps?

It's not particularly interesting.

I wanted to add audit logging for all endpoints we call, all places we call the DB, etc. across areas I haven't touched before. It would have taken me a while to track down all of the touchpoints.

Granted, I am not 100% certain that Claude didn't miss anything. I feel fairly confident that it is correct given that I had it research upfront, had multiple agents review, and it made the correct changes in the areas that I knew.

Also I'm realizing I didn't mention it included an API + UI for viewing events w/ pretty deltas

LOL, so why would I have asked you if the answer is self-admittedly not particularly interesting? It'd be like asking somebody why they took two days to put together an IKEA cupboard, of course the answer is uninteresting.

Well someone who says logging is easy never knows the difficulty of deciding "what" to log. And audit log is different beast altogether than normal logging

Audit logging is different because it's actually more straightforward than "normal logging". You just make a log entry for each state change, basically. Especially if you're storing the log entries as "objects" instead of plain text.

Besides, do you think that a LLM would be better at deciding what to log than a human that has even just a little experience with the actual system in question?

Audit logging is different than developer logging… companies will have entire teams dedicated to audit systems.

We're not as good at coding as you, naturally.

You're being sarcastic, but clearly what you're saying is literally true. So...

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