Hacker News Reader

Comment by colinmarc | Hacker News Reader

Good interface design allows extending or changing component X without having to step on the toes of your colleague working on component Y downstream. It's absolutely essential.

Interface design is one of the things Claude is worst at in my experience (using it every day for the past year).

View on HN

That reads as an example from GoF era. In practice, especially with complex software engineering codebases, which I thought you were implying by saying "large", these patterns barely exist because the problems being solved are often in friction with what is considered to be the "best practices" elsewhere (in the books, other much simpler codebases, etc.).

Thank you for engaging with my point! I agree, actually. I think if good design patterns could simply be copied out of a book, LLMs might be better at software engineering.

My point is more about up-front investment paying dividends. To speculate, it seems like the reward hacking is not there for long-term thinking.

I thought that they are already really good at software engineering but I guess that greatly depends on how one defines the "quality".

Gang of Four

But a little bit of directing of the architecture can easily bring in design patterns.

Ideally, you design patterns that enable quick replacing of parts that get to messy. The code is cheap, just start from scratch with the defined functionality pre defined instead of bolted on with jank.

Or, you could just do the thing today, and accept someone else may change it tomorrow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com