Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learn to code, ignore AI, then use AI to code even better

kyrylo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 150 posts

Re: Learn to code, ignore AI, then use AI to code even better

#81

Post by vincnetas »

nkrisc wrote: post #6

If you spend time on places that attract newbie programmers (some subreddits focused on game dev or game engines, for example) you’ll see the outcome of “I no longer think you should learn to code.” And it’s not pretty. Many, many posts of people looking for help fixing AI-generated code because the AI got it wrong and they have no idea what the code even does. Much of the time the problem is simply an invented metho…

Real live example. Recent conversation with colleague :

    Hey, trying to translate excel sheet with chatgpt, cant understand what to do (posts screenshot with explanation and example "pip install [package-name]"
    You just need to execute specified command in your environment
    What is "my environment"?

Re: Learn to code, ignore AI, then use AI to code even better

#82

Post by derekp7 »

chii wrote: post #63
nkrisc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to think of AI as a force (or skill) multiplier . If you’re low skill, it doesn’t do much. The higher your skill, the more useful it is.

That hasn't been my experience, nor that of others using the AI. It's a force constant, rather than a multiplier. If you're low skilled, asking it to do a low skilled task, it works fine. If you're high skilled, and asked it to do the low skilled task, you saved a tiny bit of time (less than that of the low skilled person). But it cannot do a high skilled task (at least, not right now). It can pretend, which can lead…

You could also be a mixed skilled developer. Good at regular code, architecture, and algorithms but not as familiar with a given UI framework. Having the LLM generate the html and css for a given layout description saves a lot of time looking through the docs.

Re: Learn to code, ignore AI, then use AI to code even better

#83

Post by whstl »

Arisaka1 wrote: post #37
whstl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subreddits focused on gamedev have long stopped being about the craft itself, unfortunately. 90% of the posts are about marketing or are self-help/motivational. Anything related to art, sound or programming barely gets upvotes.

The other side effect to that is the difficulty to socialize, albeit online, with those who care about the craft itself. To paraphrase a meme "best I can do is text editor wars".

Yep.

Gamedev.net was an amazing hang back in the early 2000s up to the 2010s.

Now it's just a perpetual "how do I do this with Unity" that is super hard to filter.

I just go to meetups now.

> best I can do is text editor wars

Or Unreal vs Unity wars in this case :'D

Re: Learn to code, ignore AI, then use AI to code even better

#84

Post by api »

nkrisc wrote: post #6

If you spend time on places that attract newbie programmers (some subreddits focused on game dev or game engines, for example) you’ll see the outcome of “I no longer think you should learn to code.” And it’s not pretty. Many, many posts of people looking for help fixing AI-generated code because the AI got it wrong and they have no idea what the code even does. Much of the time the problem is simply an invented metho…

As a very experienced programmer who has experimented with using AI: I can't imagine trying to do anything useful with it if you don't understand the code it generates.

Even if the code it generates works, what happens when you need to change it and no longer have that AI conversation and its state available?

Then there's the security nightmare this is going to be. All this slop-code generated by ignorant hustlers with AIs is going to be a hellscape of security bugs.

Re: Learn to code, ignore AI, then use AI to code even better

#85

Post by arijo »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #42
kshacker wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have played around wit AI code from time to time. I do not code routinely but I have pet personal projects that allow me to do some code and this is where I experimented. Rule number 1 and the only rule: You need to be a subject matter expert. Be it program logic or be it programming language. AI is only a helper, it will go wrong, frequently, and if you do not understand the reason for the code and the programming…

> Rule number 1 and the only rule: You need to be a subject matter expert. Strong disagree. I've been coding for 25+years but never on the front-end side. I couldn't write JS w/ pen & paper with a gun against my head. But I know what to ask and how to make sure a react component does what I want it to do, with these tools.

How many thousands of lines does your AI-generated frontend code have?

Do you have to maintain the code?

Re: Learn to code, ignore AI, then use AI to code even better

#86

Post by valenterry »

hagbarth wrote: post #74
valenterry wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a problem that is trivially solved by the error message and documentation Then why does the AI not solve it anyways? I think understanding "the code" will eventually be as important as understanding machine code or assembly nowadays - still very important for a small number of devs, important in very rare cases for some other devs and completely irrelevant to the majority of devs.

Does your question not refute your statement? The AI doesn't solve the problem because it can't.

Yeah, in a sense it does. But I think the problem here isn't "the AI" but actually the tooling or the way "the AI" is applied by the person. (i.e. being unable to even c&p the error message into the AI)

Because from my experience, sonnet 3.7 can almost always fix issues of that type and if it can't, it's usually not "trivial" at least not by my understanding of the word.

Re: Learn to code, ignore AI, then use AI to code even better

#87

Post by mirsadm »

theshrike79 wrote: post #75
kshacker wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have played around wit AI code from time to time. I do not code routinely but I have pet personal projects that allow me to do some code and this is where I experimented. Rule number 1 and the only rule: You need to be a subject matter expert. Be it program logic or be it programming language. AI is only a helper, it will go wrong, frequently, and if you do not understand the reason for the code and the programming…

AI is excellent for tasks you know how to do, but can't be arsed to spend the time. Example: I wanted a tool that notifies me of replies or upvotes to my recent Hacker News comments. Grok3 did it in 133 seconds with Think mode enabled. Total time including me giving it the example HTML as attachment and writing the specs + pasting the response to a file and running it? About 5 minutes. I know perfectly well how to do…

Yes I find this to be it's best use case. Unfortunately for anything I actually need help with the results are often terrible.

Re: Learn to code, ignore AI, then use AI to code even better

#88

Post by voidhorse »

There are a lot of reasons I dislike the use of LLMs in software, one of which is that I think it's absurd to claim that using such fuzzy and imprecise tools and methods should be considered engineering...

But to be honest, I think the main thing is that they just absolutely suck the joy and fun out of an activity. I like writing, I like coding, these are things that I do at least in part because I get some kind of direct enjoyment out of doing them. Using a chatbot simply is not interesting or fun to me. It's like being a spectator and thinking that means you "participated" in the game you watched.

If you code or whatever just as a means to make ends meet sure, it makes total sense that you'll want to use these tools, but I will absolutely never understand the people that claim to like a craft and reach for LLMs to do it—to me these people have just entirely missed the point of what it means to have an activity you enjoy. It's not about the output, it's all about the process and self-enrichment that happens along the way.

Re: Learn to code, ignore AI, then use AI to code even better

#90

Post by [deleted] »

DrScientist wrote: post #29
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #14

> Because if you can vibe code… so can everyone else. That's really the money shot, right there. CEOs have this dream of firing all their "obnoxious" engineers, and "vibe-coding" their own products. That's not something new. People have been selling this dream to gullible C-suiters since I first started coding in Machine Code (1980s). The future will belong to the engineers that can leverage AI. Engineering is a lot…

> CEOs have this dream of firing all their "obnoxious" engineers, and "vibe-coding" their own products. Give one of the key skills of a CEO's is pulling together the resources to make something happen, what happens to CEO's if you no longer need resources to make stuff happen? ie if everybody can Vibe code, vibe market, vibe deploy - aren't you going to be swamped with competitors? So the interesting thought experime…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN