31–40 of 47 posts
Nothing like cleaning up someone (or in the case of LLMs, something’s) garbage code to boost ones skill and confidence.
It’s made me lose a lot of interest in reading / watching videos about programming. I enjoy AI for what it enables me to do, but it has changed the landscape of “content” to the point where I spent a lot less time taking in what’s out there since so much is AI related. Have chosen to stop following some channels on youtube / browse HN less.
I'm still not using AI much, but I'm especially wary of using it to help me with any creative task such as writing or coding. I believe "vibe coding" is the anthesis of hacker culture. What interest I've lost is probably more due to being depressed about the direction I see things heading.
It’s quite the opposite for me. The fun / creative part for me is not googling “how to slurp the contents of a file into a string” or “the exact syntax for marking some functions as unit tests” or “the correct order of symbols to specify generic type param” It’s not “the correct html / css syntax for this basic gui I want to make” It’s not “how to achieve the thing I’ve done 10 thousand times in other languages/frame…
Learning Elixir and fixing a bug in an open source project went from "risk of a long slog over the course of a month with no reward" to "pepper an LLM with questions (debugging errors, understanding syntax, translating code snippets to English descriptions of behavior), write 20 lines of code by hand, write a few test cases, and submit the PR fix".
Yes, but perhaps not in the way you imagine. I'm still not using AI much, but I'm especially wary of using it to help me with any creative task such as writing or coding. I believe "vibe coding" is the anthesis of hacker culture. What interest I've lost is probably more due to being depressed about the direction I see things heading.
I don't use LLMs much for heavy lifting around the code. But it's an almost-excellent tool for research, finding or synthesizing examples, and generating boilerplate where other tools can't do it. "Almost", because LLMs hallucinate more often than I would like, so sometimes I have to cross-check their answers.
Alone I'm just good enough to do things well enough and secure enough when I really try. It wasn't easy but I was proud I was able to do it. I was one of the few blue collar guys (although with MechE degree from Cal) that could actually make things and sell them.
Now I feel like AI vibe coding has taken all my advantage away. So really all I have is a bit of experience.