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

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

#91

Post by supriyo-biswas »

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…

Mostly that in such a reality software engineering will cease to be a thing; however industries based around physical resources such as manufacturing, construction and healthcare will continue to employ people, and by extension, the CEO.

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

#92

Post by CharlieDigital »

intelVISA wrote: post #67
CharlieDigital wrote: post #49

Probably the opposite is true: the more you know how to code, the less productive you'll be with AI. This has been my observation watching a non-technical friend build a SaaS as a one-man team in 4 months and is generating $#,000 in revenue within 2 months. The way he uses AI is just completely different from how the technical folks I know use AI because he doesn't think about the code at all. The way he instructs th…

Problem is what kind of moat does that SaaS have? The flip side of 'we replaced our dev team with vibe coders look how fast we print shitware' is now shitware value falls close to 0, as anyone can make it. Though you suggest he's non-technical... "writing down exactly what he wants" is just coding!

   > "writing down exactly what he wants" is just coding!
That would make good project managers and business analysts "coders" and they are not coders. It is only in this age with LLMs does that line between functional requirements and code become blurred.

He doesn't know how to write code well; he knows how to write requirements and instructions well from managing offshore teams.

In practice, his instructions are detailed in the functional domain. Engineers bias too much in the technical domain.

    > The flip side of 'we replaced our dev team with vibe coders look how fast we print shitware' is now shitware value falls close to 0, as anyone can make it.
Actually, he recognizes this and said something to the effect of "this is the end of SaaS" meaning that anyone can build this. That's his biggest fear going all in on this (he is still keeping his day job despite this project gaining traction so quickly)

But I don't think this is true; I think there are still some technical barriers (at the moment) like one needs to know to instruct about databases, set up external services, etc. The AI is writing the connections to some third party APIs, but one needs to know what an API is and which one to use to instruct the agent.

A future may be coming where this is no longer the case (e.g. combining deep research and computer use that will automatically set up domains, connect external services, etc.), but it's not here yet.

    > 'shitware'
Is it "shitware" if customers are paying because they are deriving value from it? He's got 30 customers, a few of which paid annual subscriptions because it provided value to their actual business. Is it "shitware" because it's not handcrafted? Does it matter if it's solving some real problem and customers want to pay for it?

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

#93

Post by adriand »

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…

Knowing how to code, and having a lot of experience and an "intuitive" sense of what is a good idea and what is a bad idea, also puts you in a position to question the advice the AI gives you. Just now I was asking Claude to help me with an issue with a React component and it told me to add useEffect with a timer. I am not a React expert, but that immediately felt like a code smell to me, so I followed up:

> is it weird or an anti-pattern to use a timer like this?

The response:

> Yes, using a timer like this is generally considered an anti-pattern in React for several reasons: It introduces non-deterministic behavior (timing-dependent code), It's a workaround rather than addressing the root cause, It can be brittle and lead to race conditions.

I'm sure all those things are true. This is a classic example of the problem with people using AI programming tools but lacking a real understanding of what they're doing. They don't know enough to question the advice they're getting, let alone properly review the code its generating.

The other day, in a Rails app, Claude generated a bunch of code that spawned various threads to accomplish certain things I needed to do asynchronously. Maybe these days, in Ruby 3 and Rails 8, this is safe. But I remember that back in the Rails 2 days, going off and spawning new threads was not a good idea. Plus, I have a back-end async job processor already set up. Again, I questioned the approach. The revised code I got back was a lot simpler, and once I'd reviewed and tested it, I (mostly) used it as-is.

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

#94

Post by larusso »

theshrike79 wrote: post #76
ElectricalUnion wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience using ai, if you don't write a really precise description of your initial requirements in the initial prompt, and it it doesn't one-shot the answer, I don't bother asking it to fix the mistake. Unless you're using a LLM with really long context, it's prone that some context loss will happen soner or later - when that happens, pointing errors that dropped out of the context will just result in repea…

This is why platforms(?) like Claude Code, Cursor and Windsurf are essential. Claude Code forces you to create a CLAUDE.md to direct how it works, with Cursor you can (and should) write Cursor Rules. The difference with a good spec + AI vs just vibe coding from scratch is like night and day.

I don‘t use these tools daily because I have a hard time to commit to these workflows. But do I need to do this setup once, once per project or every time for one off things I might code?

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

#95

Post by sunwukung »

I've been following some kid on TikTok who started last year on this journey - and it's been truly frustrating to watch. I tried to discourage them from leaning so heavily on AI, but they insisted it was a different way of learning. A year later, and they still don't comprehend for loops or conditional blocks, and believe that comprehending this basic material is a deep understanding of code.

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

#96

Post by baxtr »

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…

That’s an interesting observation, because a corollary of this would be: if young people believe this to be true and don’t start learning to code now, there will be an even higher shortage of developers, unless the AI system become insanely better than today.

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

#98

Post by dingnuts »

theshrike79 wrote: post #76
ElectricalUnion wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience using ai, if you don't write a really precise description of your initial requirements in the initial prompt, and it it doesn't one-shot the answer, I don't bother asking it to fix the mistake. Unless you're using a LLM with really long context, it's prone that some context loss will happen soner or later - when that happens, pointing errors that dropped out of the context will just result in repea…

This is why platforms(?) like Claude Code, Cursor and Windsurf are essential. Claude Code forces you to create a CLAUDE.md to direct how it works, with Cursor you can (and should) write Cursor Rules. The difference with a good spec + AI vs just vibe coding from scratch is like night and day.

why would I pay for the advanced features when I haven't been impressed with the free features? in fact Claude 3.5, which is what is available, is a nearly worthless product, with value comparable to a free search engine, and not even a very good one. It is usually incorrect and frequently in subtle ways that will cost me a lot of time.

pro AI people sound like someone with an expensive addiction trying to justify it. the free product is bad, so I just need to pay to see the light?

Why would Anthropic let me use a model for free that is going to make me more skeptical of their paid offerings unless it is pretty similar to the paid ones and they think it's good?

Just read the manual and write the code yourself. These toys are a distraction.

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

#99

Post by exodust »

grumbel wrote: post #59

Ignoring AI would be foolish, since AI is the best programming tutor you can wish for and will speed up your learning noticeably, since you can always ask for clarification or examples when something isn't clear. It's also a great way to get random data for testing. And it will help you unearth lesser known corners of a programming language that you might have overlooked otherwise. The downside is that at the current…

> AI is the best programming tutor you can wish for...you can always ask for clarification or examples when something isn't clear

Yep, AI can teach beginners the fundamentals with endless patience and examples to suit everyone's style and goals. Walking you through concepts and giving you simulated encouragement as you progress. Scary stuff, but that's how it is.

But... as we know, it doesn't always provide the best solution. Or it gets muddled. When you point out its mistakes, it apologises, recognises the mistake and explains why its a mistake. It's reasoning is incredible, but it still makes mistakes. This could be very risky for production code.

Related anecdote... I needed Photoshop help recently for horizontally offsetting a vignette effect. Surprisingly not easy. The built-in vignette filter can't be applied to a new blank layer, and is always centred on the image. AI suggested making it manually but I didn't want to do that, as I like the built-in vignette better. AI's next solution involved several complicated steps using channel isolation and weird selection masking etc. No thanks. Then my own brain sparked a better idea... simply increase the canvas size temporarily, apply the vignette, then crop back to the original size. Job done. I told AI about my solution and it was gushing with praise about how brilliant my solution was compared to its own. Moral: never stop trusting your own brain.

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

#100

Post by sharemywin »

adriand wrote: post #93
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…

Knowing how to code, and having a lot of experience and an "intuitive" sense of what is a good idea and what is a bad idea, also puts you in a position to question the advice the AI gives you. Just now I was asking Claude to help me with an issue with a React component and it told me to add useEffect with a timer. I am not a React expert, but that immediately felt like a code smell to me, so I followed up: > is it we…

that's the thing if your inquisitive and have an interest in learning things then you can still go far with AI coding. can you explain why this code works?

is this the best way to do it or are there other solutions? what are the pros and cons?

are there security problems with this? how could I make this code more secure?

what are some things I should look out for with AI coding(meta question)?

what does this error mean?

just talking back and forth with the AI on the phone you can get a high level understanding of a topic pretty quickly and way more in depth and personalized than a tutorial on the internet.

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