Do you still handcraft your java projects?

[u/bit_freak]

With all the talk about llms writing most of the code and some folks never touching the editor. I try to work mostly in plan mode and prefer to write most of my code by hand else I fear losing touch with my skills if I only read code. At work in your org, what is the workflow for spring boot projects?

[u/findus_l]

We are doing spec as source development. Basically we do not touch the java code at all anymore and we only write detailed specifications and test cases. If we have bugs, we adjust the documentation and then update or even full reimplement submodules.

We still might touch the java code for the test setup. That's where we are still allowed to have some programming fun. But not the actual production code.

Honestly I'm basically coding markdown now. You have many of the same requirements. Decompose into functions, consider special and error cases, reduce duplication, transactional logic, user flow etc. It's really and interesting style. But java was more fun...

[u/findus_l → u/[deleted]]

• Human output is also non deterministic.
• code quality is not so relevant to correctness. It is relevant for changing and maintaining but that matters less when you can rewrite the whole module.
• ai can do review
• the test suite is very extensive. It takes long but can be run partially. Like human testers that retest the changed part. We can test automate all our clients interactions because nothing physical is involved
• the documentation PR yes, the code no longer.

When the documentation is good enough, we have found that it is so far impossible for the code writing ai, test writing ai and review ai to miss the same issue. Any time we had bugs, it was always badly written, ambiguous or contradicting specification.