41–50 of 57 posts
> People coming from highly respected universities are doing everything with AI Nowadays, everybody is doing everything with AI, young and old alike. It's very hard to justify not doing it. That being said, you can produce good code with AI, if you know what it should look like and spend the time to prompt and iterate.
There seems to be a disconnect, with some people claiming they don't write code any more, only specs, and me trying to get Copilot to fix a stupid sizing bug in our layout engine and it Not Getting It. Is this because the guys claiming success are working in popular, known, more limited areas like Javascript in web pages, and the people outside those, with more complex systems, don't get the same results ? I also not…
In my opinion these guys just don't give a sh** on "stupid sizing bugs". Those who cares about how they software behaves and looks like realises after a while that most of AI claims are scam.
At the same time, I see the future being brighter with the help of these coding LLMs — I personally was not building software for years, focusing on management-like work. Serious coding during 'free time' was just too heavy to lift — you need time to sleep, eat and do some IRL things too...
Now, having experience in building software and caring of what I create and why I can do this far more quickly with LLMs and it kinda opens possibilities I could only dream of before. Like get a few spare $$$ millions and hire a team to build something before = pay $20 to Cursor/Claude and spend a few days guiding it like if it was a team of junior outsource devs: it's painful sometimes, but if you really know what you're doing and why — it works. And no one stops you from tweaking pixels when the majority of work is done — you'll even have a will to, as opposed to writing it all by yourself and spending all your mental energy on routine stuff.
So... if people learn to use this hammer properly — I suppose the future might be brighter than the past. And also those who actually care but didn't have time to do things they're passionate about now can do things on their own.
> People coming from highly respected universities are doing everything with AI Nowadays, everybody is doing everything with AI, young and old alike. It's very hard to justify not doing it. That being said, you can produce good code with AI, if you know what it should look like and spend the time to prompt and iterate.
I realize I am an extreme outlier, but I have not yet once used AI in my software development job.
I think all of this has a dark future. And this can be argued based on how AI works. AI systems look at code on the internet that was written by humans. This is smart, clean code. And they learn from it. What they produce — unreadable spaghetti code — is the maximum they can squeeze out of the best code written by humans. In the near future, AI-generated code will flood the internet, and AI will start training on its…
I think all of this has a dark future. And this can be argued based on how AI works. AI systems look at code on the internet that was written by humans. This is smart, clean code. And they learn from it. What they produce — unreadable spaghetti code — is the maximum they can squeeze out of the best code written by humans. In the near future, AI-generated code will flood the internet, and AI will start training on its…
We’ve had a looming crisis for decades of young people increasingly not understanding a lot of the fundamentals of mathematical logic. And I think treating LLMs (which are amazing tools) as “AI,” and having it play this type of role, is the final step towards a lot of unrecoverable self-destruction. We need to remember that the core of what “logic” is can be understood by every human mind, and that it’s our individua…
Even at the presidential level, today:
>RFK Jr claims basic math rules don’t apply to White House https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/rfk-jr-math-percentage...
I think all of this has a dark future. And this can be argued based on how AI works. AI systems look at code on the internet that was written by humans. This is smart, clean code. And they learn from it. What they produce — unreadable spaghetti code — is the maximum they can squeeze out of the best code written by humans. In the near future, AI-generated code will flood the internet, and AI will start training on its…
I agree, that AI generated code will really start to piss in the pool so to speak. I'm not sure the models will get better without a lot of hand curation and signals of what is good vs bad vs popular code. They emphatically are not the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’ve had a looming crisis for decades of young people increasingly not understanding a lot of the fundamentals of mathematical logic. And I think treating LLMs (which are amazing tools) as “AI,” and having it play this type of role, is the final step towards a lot of unrecoverable self-destruction. We need to remember that the core of what “logic” is can be understood by every human mind, and that it’s our individua…
Do most young people need to understanding the fundamentals of mathematical logic? We seem to get by without that. Even at the presidential level, today: >RFK Jr claims basic math rules don’t apply to White House https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/rfk-jr-math-percentage...
It's a problem. Seniors with AI perform far better because they have the skills and experience to properly review the LLM's plans and outputs. Juniors don't have that skillset yet, but they're being pushed to use AI because their peers are using it. Where do you draw the line? What will happen when the current senior developers start retiring? What will happen when a new technology shows up that LLMs don't have human…
1. AI gets better enough fast enough that by the time the senior people are retiring, it won't matter anyway
2. Software becomes mostly unreadable and nobody really understands how it works, but the AI is good enough that this is ok
Both are hard for me to imagine right now, but if you'd asked me five years ago if AI would ever be good enough to commit to my codebase, I would have said, "I really doubt it". Yet here we are, AI code is sometimes better than handwritten code (depending on the person of course).
Would love to hear others thoughts on these as well.
MichaelRazum, you're hitting on something crucial many of us in the trenches are seeing. The "code is cheap" mentality, as you call it, leads to bloated, unreadable code. As baCist points out, if AI starts training on its own generated code, we're headed for a real problem with quality degradation. I've found experienced developers leverage AI as a force multiplier because they can scrutinize the output, unlike junio…
I can't imagine the people using many agents in parallel are actually even checking the fitness of the output they are generating, let alone the design, structure and quality of the code itself.
Ask AI to ruthlessly reduce cognitive debt, purge unnecessarily defensive code and be extremely pragmatic about what you want to build. If an AI junior is building you Vault when you just asked for a secret rotator script, he's just showing off. Gently pull him from the clouds, since this is also within the JD of a senior engineer.
The defensive code is getting to me (it's adding a ton of bloat) and I'm trying to fight it but I'm not sure how best to word it. What I've attempted hasn't worked too well so far. How do you get it to not add so much unnecessarily defensive code?