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AI Is Making Developers Dumb

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Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#81

Post by switchbak »

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?

To be fair, this person wasn’t claiming they’re making a trade off on quality, just that they prefer to build things quickly. If an AI let you keep quality constant and deliver faster, for example.

I don’t think that’s what LLMs offer, mind you (right now anyway), and I often find the trade offs to not be worth it in retrospect, but it’s hard to know which bucket you’re in ahead of time.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#82

Post by igor_varga »

nextts wrote: post #49
jtwaleson wrote: post #40

Plato, in the Phaedrus, 370BC: "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

Good job he wrote that down.

Good one

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#83

Post by senordevnyc »

rvense wrote: post #58
MarcelOlsz wrote: post #5

I've had a similar experience. I built out a feature using an LLM and then found the library it must have been "taking" the code from, so what I ended up was a much worse mangled version of what already existed, had I taken the time to properly research. I've now fully gone back to just getting it to prototype functions for me in-editor based off comments, and I do the rest. Setting up AI pipelines with rule files an…

Is it just me or has this been a year or two off for at least a year or two now?

It’s exponentially better for me to use AI for coding than it was two years ago. GPT-4 launched two years and two days ago. Claude 3.5 sonnet was still fifteen months away. There were no reasoning models. Costs were an order of magnitude or two higher. Cursor and Windsurf hadn’t been released.

The last two years have brought staggering progress.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#85

Post by adverbly »

andrehacker wrote: post #55
adverbly wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calculators do not accept ambiguous instructions and they work 100% of the time.

>> Calculators do not accept ambiguous instructions and they work 100% of the time. That is stated with a lot of confidence :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066953 https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/resources/example... https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/27702/what...

Fair point!

Love me some edge cases :D

Let's call it 100% of the time in 99%+ of scenarios.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#86

Post by GoblinSlayer »

dfabulich wrote: post #67

We've seen this happen over and over again, when a new leaky layer of abstraction is developed that makes it easier to develop working code without understanding the lower layer. It's almost always a leaky abstraction, because sometimes you do need to know how the lower layer really works. Every time this happens, developers who have invested a lot of time and emotional energy in understanding the lower level claim t…

Understanding assembler (or even just ABI) if useful.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#87

Post by jtwaleson »

tarkin2 wrote: post #63
jtwaleson wrote: post #40

Plato, in the Phaedrus, 370BC: "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

And our memory has declined. He was right

For sure. But through writing we've been able to learn more, and through AI we'll produce more.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#88

Post by 101008 »

dfabulich wrote: post #67

We've seen this happen over and over again, when a new leaky layer of abstraction is developed that makes it easier to develop working code without understanding the lower layer. It's almost always a leaky abstraction, because sometimes you do need to know how the lower layer really works. Every time this happens, developers who have invested a lot of time and emotional energy in understanding the lower level claim t…

> (My favorite use of coding LLMs is to ask them to help me understand code I don't yet understand. Even when it gets the answer wrong, it's often right enough to give me the hints I need to figure it out myself.)

Agree, specially useful when you join a new company and you have to navegate a large codebase (or bad-maintained codebase, which is even worse by several orders of magnitude). I had no luck asking LLM to fix this or that, but it did mostly OK when I asked how it works and what the code is trying to code (it includes mistakes but that's fine, I can see them, which is different if it was just code that I copy and paste).

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#89

Post by ryaniscool »

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 don't think the author is saying it's a dichotomy. Like, you're either a disciple of doing things "ye olde way" or allowing the LLM to do it for you.

I find his point to be that there is still a lot of value in understanding what is actually going on.

Our business is one of details and I don't think you can code strictly having an LLM doing everything. It does weird and wrong stuff sometimes. It's still necessary to understand the code.

Re: AI Is Making Developers Dumb

#90

Post by captainclam »

This is one of the many many experiences in the tapestry of people figuring out how to use this new tool.

There will be many such cases of engineers losing their edge.

There will be many cases of engineers skillfully wielding LLMs and growing as a result.

There will be many cases of hobbyists becoming empowered to build new things.

There will be many cases of SWEs getting lazy and building up huge, messy, intractable code bases.

I enjoy reading from all these perspectives. I am tired of sweeping statements like "AI is Making Developers Dumb."

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