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AI Is Making Developers Dumb

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Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#41

Post by jaggirs »

tyre wrote: post #12
popularrecluse wrote: post #2

"Some people might not enjoy writing their own code. If that’s the case, as harsh as it may seem, I would say that they’re trying to work in a field that isn’t for them." I've tolerated writing my own code for decades. Sometimes I'm pleased with it. Mostly it's the abstraction standing between me and my idea. I like to build things, the faster the better. As I have the ideas, I like to see them implemented as efficie…

> I like to build things, the faster the better. what's the largest (traffic, revenue) product you've built? quantity >>>> quality of code is a great trade-off for hacking things together but doesn't lend itself to maintainable systems, in my experience. Have you seen it work to the long term?

I suppose that's where the use case for LLMs starts to diminish rapidly.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#42

Post by currymj »

jll29 wrote: post #3

LLMs also take away the motivation from students to properly concentrate and deeply understand a technical problem (including but not limited to coding problems); instead, they copy, paste and move on without understanding. The electronic calculator analogy might be appropriate: it's a tool appropriate once you have learned how to do the calculations by hand. In an experiment (six months long, twice repeated, so a on…

it's particularly bad for students who should be trying to learn.

at the same time in my own life, there are tasks that I don't want to do, and certainly don't want to learn anything about, yet have to do.

For example, figuring out a weird edge case combination of flags for a badly designed LaTeX library that I will only ever have to use once. I could try to read the documentation and understand it, but this would take a long time. And, even if it would take no time at all, I literally would prefer not to have this knowledge wasting neurons in my brain.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#43

Post by butterlettuce »

jll29 wrote: post #3

LLMs also take away the motivation from students to properly concentrate and deeply understand a technical problem (including but not limited to coding problems); instead, they copy, paste and move on without understanding. The electronic calculator analogy might be appropriate: it's a tool appropriate once you have learned how to do the calculations by hand. In an experiment (six months long, twice repeated, so a on…

I wish I had an LLM as a student because I couldn’t afford a tutor and googling for information was tedious.

It’s the college’s responsbility now to teach students how to harness the power of LLMs effectively. They can’t keep their heads in the sand forever.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#45

Post by danielmarkbruce »

tyre wrote: post #12
popularrecluse wrote: post #2

"Some people might not enjoy writing their own code. If that’s the case, as harsh as it may seem, I would say that they’re trying to work in a field that isn’t for them." I've tolerated writing my own code for decades. Sometimes I'm pleased with it. Mostly it's the abstraction standing between me and my idea. I like to build things, the faster the better. As I have the ideas, I like to see them implemented as efficie…

> I like to build things, the faster the better. what's the largest (traffic, revenue) product you've built? quantity >>>> quality of code is a great trade-off for hacking things together but doesn't lend itself to maintainable systems, in my experience. Have you seen it work to the long term?

Sure, but the vast majority of the time in greenfield applications situations, it's entirely unclear if what is being built is useful, even when people think otherwise. So the question of "maintainable" or not is frequently not the right consideration.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#46

Post by BooneJS »

If you use LLMs in lieu of searching Stack Overflow, you're going to go faster and be neither smarter nor dumber. If you're prompting for entire functions, I suspect it'll be a crutch you learn to rely on forever.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#47

Post by mlhpdx »

Cyclone_ wrote: post #23
palmotea wrote: post #8

That's probably the mechanism by which AI will take over many jobs: 1. Skilled people do a good job, AI does a not-so-good job. 2. AI users get dumbed down so they can't do any better. Mediocrity normalized. 3. Replace the AI users with AI.

In this scenario, if AI does a not so good job, there will still be good developers left to code.

Maybe. It might be that the “industry” continues on without good code, slowly dying.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#48

Post by Velorivox »

Cyclone_ wrote: post #19

I use LLMs for generating small chunks of code (less than 150 lines) but I am of the opinion that you should always understand what generated cide is doing. I take time go read through it and make sure it makes sense before I actually run it. I've found that for smaller chunks of code it's usually pretty accurate on the first try. Occasionally it can't figure it out all all, even with trying to massage the prompt to…

I use Claude Sonnet to generate large chunks of code, practically as a form of macro expansion. Such as when adapting SQL queries to a new migration, or adding straightforward UI. Even still, it sometimes isn’t great and I would never commit anything without carefully observing what it actually wrote. More importantly, I never ask it to do something I myself don’t know how to do, especially if I suspect a library or best practice exists.

In other words, I treat it exactly like stochastic autocomplete. It makes me lazier, I’m sure, but the first part of the article above is a rant against a tautology: any tool worth using ought to be missed by the user if they stopped using it!

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#50

Post by moogly »

popularrecluse wrote: post #2

"Some people might not enjoy writing their own code. If that’s the case, as harsh as it may seem, I would say that they’re trying to work in a field that isn’t for them." I've tolerated writing my own code for decades. Sometimes I'm pleased with it. Mostly it's the abstraction standing between me and my idea. I like to build things, the faster the better. As I have the ideas, I like to see them implemented as efficie…

I like coding on private projects at home; that is fun and creative. The coding I get to do at work inbetween waiting for CI, scouring logs, monitoring APM dashboards and reviewing PRs, in a style and abstraction level I find inappropriate is not interesting at all. A type of change that might take 10 minutes at home might take 2 days at work.
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