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The hidden cost of AI coding

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Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#71

Post by ToucanLoucan »

smj-edison wrote: post #60
tptacek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bit of a tangent but... Haven't we been automating jobs away since the industrial revolution? I know AI may be an exception to this trend, but at least with classical programming, demand goes up, GDP per capita goes up, and new industries are born. I mean, there's three ways to get stuff done: do it yourself, get someone else to do it, or get a machine to do it. #2 doesn't scale, since someone still has to do it. If…

> as long as there's a simultaneous effort to help (especially those who are poor) transition to a new form of working.

Somehow everyone who says this misses that never in the history of the United States (and most other countries tbh) has this been true.

We just consign people to the streets in industrial quantity. More underserved to act as the lubricant for capitalism.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#72

Post by simonw »

only-one1701 wrote: post #61
tmpz22 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prompt engineering is just trying that task on a variety of models and prompt variations until you can better understand the syntax needed to get the desired outcome, if the desired outcome can be gotten. Honestly you’re trying to prove AI is ineffective by telling us it didn’t work with your ineffective protocol. That is not a strong argument.

What should I have done there? Tell it to make sure that it gives me all 10 objects I give it back? Tell it to not put brackets in the wrong place? This is a real question --- what would you have done?

How long ago was this? I'd be surprised to see Claude 3.7 Sonnet make a mistake of this nature.

Either way, when a model starts making dumb mistakes like that these days I start a fresh conversation (to blow away all of the bad tokens in the current one), either with that model or another one.

I often switch from Claude 3.7 Sonnet to o3 or o4-mini these days. I paste in the most recent "good" version of the thing we're working on and prompt from there.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#73

Post by misiti3780 »

simonw wrote: post #11
misiti3780 wrote: post #2

i dont know where you are working, but where I work i cant prompt 90% of my job away using cursor. in fact, I find all of these tools to be more and more useless and our codebase is growing and becoming more complex based on the current state of AI and the progress im witnessing on a month-by-month basis - my current prediction is there is zero chance AI agents are going to be coding and replacing me in the next few…

Don't get distracted by claims that AI agents "replace programmers". Those are pure hype. I'm willing to bet that in a few years most of the developers you know will be using LLMs on a daily basis, and will be more productive because of it (having learned how to use it).

this is already the case.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#74

Post by tptacek »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #69
tptacek wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of the time when we tell ourselves this, it's cope. Software is automation. "Computers" used to be people! Literally, people.

I'm unable and unwilling to shadowbox with what you think I'm actually experiencing.

That's fine; read it as me speaking to the whole thread, not challenging you directly. Technology drives economic productivity; increasing economic productivity generally implies worker displacement. That workers come out ahead in the long run (they have in the past; it's obviously not a guarantee) is besides my point. Software is automating software development away, the same way it automated a huge percentage of (say) law firm billable hours away. We'd better be ready to suck it up!

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#75

Post by smj-edison »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #71
smj-edison wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of a tangent but... Haven't we been automating jobs away since the industrial revolution? I know AI may be an exception to this trend, but at least with classical programming, demand goes up, GDP per capita goes up, and new industries are born. I mean, there's three ways to get stuff done: do it yourself, get someone else to do it, or get a machine to do it. #2 doesn't scale, since someone still has to do it. If…

> as long as there's a simultaneous effort to help (especially those who are poor) transition to a new form of working. Somehow everyone who says this misses that never in the history of the United States (and most other countries tbh) has this been true. We just consign people to the streets in industrial quantity. More underserved to act as the lubricant for capitalism.

But... My local library has a job searching program? I have a friend who's learning masonry at a government sponsored training program? It seems the issue is not that resources don't exist, but that these people don't have the time to use them. So it's unfair to say they don't exist. Rather, it seems they're structured in an unhelpful way for those who are working double jobs, etc.

I see capitalism invoked as a "boogey man" a lot, which fair enough, you can make an emotional argument, but it's not specific enough to actually be helpful in coming up with a solution to help these people.

In fact, capitalism has been the exact thing that has lifted so many out of poverty. Things can be simultaneously bad and also have gotten better over time.

I would argue that the biggest issue is education, but that's another tangent...

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#76

Post by rozap »

tptacek wrote: post #63
codr7 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close, those were all deterministic, this is probabilistic.

The output of the LLM is probabilistic. The code you actually commit or merge is not.

i'm just vibing though, maybe i merge, maybe i don't, based on the vibes

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#77

Post by frollogaston »

tptacek wrote: post #40
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah I see it as fair game

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#78

Post by myk9001 »

tptacek wrote: post #64
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away. Depends what you write. What I work on isn't about eliminating jobs at all, if anything it creates them. And like, actual, good jobs that people would want, not, again, paying someone below the poverty line $5 to deliver an overpriced burrito across town.

I think most of the time when we tell ourselves this, it's cope. Software is automation. "Computers" used to be people! Literally, people.

> "Computers" used to be people! Literally, people.

Not always. Recruitment budgets have limits, so it's a fixed number of employees either providing services to a larger number of customers thanks to software, or serving fewer customers or do so less often without the software.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#79

Post by jaredcwhite »

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…

> most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could

Not me. I code because I love to code, and I get paid to do what I love. If that's not you…find a different profession?

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#80

Post by frollogaston »

codr7 wrote: post #46
frollogaston wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not even close, those were all deterministic, this is probabilistic.

So what? I know most compilers are deterministic, but it really only matters for reproducible builds, not that you're actually going to reason about the output. And the language makes few guarantees about the resulting instructions.
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