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

The hidden cost of AI coding

terriblesoftware.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 475 posts

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#31

Post by only-one1701 »

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…

I see this "prompting is an art" stuff a lot. I gave Claude a list of 10 objects and asked it to make an adjustment to all of them. It gave me 9 back. When I asked it to try again it gave me 10 but one didn't work. What's "prompt engineering" there, telling it to try again until it gets it right? I'd rather just do it right the first time.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#32

Post by hermanradtke »

righthand wrote: post #28
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.

Yes, there are bad places to work. There are also places that require detailed time tracking, do not allow any time to write tests, have very long hours, tons of on-call alerts, etc.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#33

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

I think.. based on recent events.. that some of the corporate inefficiencies are very poorly captured. Last year we had an insane project that was thrown at us before end of the year, because, basically, company had a tiff with the vendor and would rather have us spend our time in meetings trying to do what they are doing rather than pay vendor for that thing. From simple money spent perspective, one would think company's simple amoral compass would be a boon.

AI coding is similar. We just had a minor issue with ai generated code that was clearly not vetted as closely as it should have been making output it generated over a couple of months not as accurate as it should be. Obviously, it had to be corrected, then vetted and so on, because there is always time to correct things...

edit: What I am getting at is the old-fashioned, penny smart, but pound foolish.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#34

Post by only-one1701 »

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.

I like writing code more than reading it, personally.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#35

Post by ToucanLoucan »

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 problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious?

Look at the majority of the tech sector for the last ten years or so and tell me this answer again.

Like I guess this is kind of true, if "problems for real people" equals "compensating for inefficiencies in our system for people with money" and "solutions" equals "making a poor person do it for them and paying them as little as legally possible."

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#36

Post by codr7 »

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…

I wouldn't, I got into software exactly because I enjoy solving problems and writing code. Verifying shitty, mindless, computer generated code is not something I would consider doing for all the money in the world.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#37

Post by smj-edison »

drooby wrote: post #14

I've been singin' this song for years. We should return to Small Data. Hand picked, locally sourced, data. Data I can buy at a mom and pop shop. Data I can smell, data I can feel, data I can yearn for. Gone are those days.

I'm guessing you're referencing KRAZAM? https://youtu.be/eDr6_cMtfdA

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#38

Post by codr7 »

only-one1701 wrote: post #31
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…

I see this "prompting is an art" stuff a lot. I gave Claude a list of 10 objects and asked it to make an adjustment to all of them. It gave me 9 back. When I asked it to try again it gave me 10 but one didn't work. What's "prompt engineering" there, telling it to try again until it gets it right? I'd rather just do it right the first time.

We used to make fun of and look down on coders who mindlessly copy paste and mash the compile button until the code runs, for good reasons.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#40

Post by tptacek »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #35
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 problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious? Look at the majority of the tech sector for the last ten years or so and tell me this answer again. Like I guess this is kind of true, if "problems for real people" equals "compensating for inefficiencies in our system for people with money" and "solutions" equals "making a poor person do it for them and paying them as little as legally possib…

Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away. There is no profession with less claim to the moral high ground of worker rights than ours.
Post reply on HN