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The hidden cost of AI coding

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#21

Post by simonw »

pdimitar wrote: post #17

I don't know man, maybe prompt most of your work, eyeball it and verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!), run a script to commit and push after 3 hours and then... work on whatever code makes you happy without using an LLM? Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could. Still, prompting LLMs…

> "verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!)"

100% this.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#22

Post by frollogaston »

tptacek wrote: post #4

After all, if we lose the joy in our craft, what exactly are we optimizing for? Solving problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious? Our field has a whole ethos of open-source side projects people do for love and enjoyment. In the same way that you might spend your weekends in a basement woodworking shop without furnishing your entire house by hand, I think the craft of programming will be just fi…

Same as when higher-level languages replaced assembly for a lot of use cases. And btw, at least in places I've worked, better traditional tooling would replace a lot more headcount than AI would.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#24

Post by troupo »

pdimitar wrote: post #17

I don't know man, maybe prompt most of your work, eyeball it and verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!), run a script to commit and push after 3 hours and then... work on whatever code makes you happy without using an LLM? Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could. Still, prompting LLMs…

> Still, prompting LLMs well requires eloquence and expressiveness that many programmers don't have

It requires magical incantations that may or may not work and where a missing comma in a prompt can break the output just as badly as the US waking up and draining compute resources.

Has nothing to do with eloquence

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#25

Post by hellisothers »

pdimitar wrote: post #17

I don't know man, maybe prompt most of your work, eyeball it and verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!), run a script to commit and push after 3 hours and then... work on whatever code makes you happy without using an LLM? Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could. Still, prompting LLMs…

> Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could.

I don’t think this is the case, if anything the opposite is true. Most of us would like to do the work code but have realized, at some career point, that you’re paid more to abstract yourself away from that and get others to do it either in technical leadership or management.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#26

Post by williamstein »

simonw wrote: post #21
pdimitar wrote: post #17

I don't know man, maybe prompt most of your work, eyeball it and verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!), run a script to commit and push after 3 hours and then... work on whatever code makes you happy without using an LLM? Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could. Still, prompting LLMs…

> "verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!)" 100% this.

Totally. And yet rigorous proof is very difficult. Having done some mathematics involving nontrivial proofs, I respect even more how difficult rigor is.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#27

Post by pdimitar »

hellisothers wrote: post #25
pdimitar wrote: post #17

I don't know man, maybe prompt most of your work, eyeball it and verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!), run a script to commit and push after 3 hours and then... work on whatever code makes you happy without using an LLM? Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could. Still, prompting LLMs…

> Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could. I don’t think this is the case, if anything the opposite is true. Most of us would like to do the work code but have realized, at some career point, that you’re paid more to abstract yourself away from that and get others to do it either in technical leadership or management.

Well, does not help that a lot of work tasks are meaningless drudgery that we collectively should have trivialized and 100% automated at least 20 years. That was kind of the core my point: a lot of work tasks are just plain BS.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#28

Post by righthand »

iamleppert wrote: post #3

There's nothing stopping you from coding if you enjoy it. It's not like they have taken away your keyboard. I have found that AI frees me up to focus on the parts of coding I'm actually interested in, which is maybe 5-10% of the project. The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing circle of hell that I really could care less about. I care about certain things…

They perhaps haven’t taken away your keyboard but anecdotally, a few friends work at places where their boss is requiring them to use the LLMs. So you may not have to code with them but some people are starting to be chained to them.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#29

Post by EasyMarion »

tptacek wrote: post #4

After all, if we lose the joy in our craft, what exactly are we optimizing for? Solving problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious? Our field has a whole ethos of open-source side projects people do for love and enjoyment. In the same way that you might spend your weekends in a basement woodworking shop without furnishing your entire house by hand, I think the craft of programming will be just fi…

solving real problems is the core of it, but for a lot of people the joy and meaning come from how they solve them too. the shift to AI tools might feel like outsourcing the interesting part, even if the outcome is still useful. side projects will stick around for sure, but i think it's fair to ask what the day-to-day feels like when more of it becomes reviewing and prompting rather than building.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#30

Post by jimbob45 »

pdimitar wrote: post #17

I don't know man, maybe prompt most of your work, eyeball it and verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!), run a script to commit and push after 3 hours and then... work on whatever code makes you happy without using an LLM? Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could. Still, prompting LLMs…

The act of coding preserves your skills for that all-important verification step. No coding and the whole system falls apart.
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