The hidden cost of AI coding

We have always automated, because we can.

What is qualitatively different this time is that it affects intellectual abilities - there is nothing higher up in the work "food chain". Replacing physical work you could always argue you'd have time to focus on making decisions. Replacing decision making might mean telling people go sit on the beach and take your universal basic income (UBI) cheque, we don't need you anymore.

Sitting on the beach is not as nice as it sounds for some; if you don't agree, try doing it for 5 years. Most people require work to have some sense of purpose, it gives identity, and it structures their time.

Furthermore, if you replaced lorry drivers with self-driving cars, you'd destroy the most commonly held job in North America as well as South America, and don't tell me that they can be retrained to be AI engineers or social media influencers instead (some can only be on the road, some only want to be on the road).

You write that like the latter is in opposition to the former. Yet the content suggests the latter is the former

I think you're robbing yourself.

Of course, it all depends how you use the LLM. While the same can be true for StackOverflow, the LLMs just scale the issues up.

  > 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.

Except you do care. It's why you're frustrated and annoyed. And good!!! That feeling is because what you're describing requires solving. If something is routine, automate it. But it's really not good to automate in a statistical way, especially when that statistical tool is optimized for human preference. Because remember that also means mistakes are optimized to be missed by humans.[0]

With expertise in anything, I'm sorry, but you also got to do the shit work. To be a great musician you gotta practice boring scales. It's true even if you just want to be a sub par one.

But a little grumpy is good. It drives you to fix things, and frankly, that's our job. The things that are annoying and creating friction don't need be repeated over and over, they need alternative solutions. The scripts you build are valuable. The "useless" knowledge you gain isn't so useless. Those little details add up without you knowing and make you better.

That undocumented code makes you frustrated and reminds you to document your own. You don't want to be a hypocrite. The author of the thing you're using probably thought the same thing: "No one is gonna use this garbage, I'm not going to waste my time documenting it". Yet here we are. Over and over again yet we don't learn the lesson.

I'm not gonna deny there's assholes. There are. But even assholes teach you. At worst, they teach you how not to act.

And some people are you telling you to RTM and not RTFM. Sure, it has lots of extra information in it that you don't need to get your specific job done, but have you also considered that it has lots of extra information in it? The person that wrote it clearly thought the context was important. Maybe it isn't. In that case, you learned a lesson in how not to write documentation!

What I'm getting at is that there's a lot of learning done all over the place. Trying to take out all the work and only have "the fun" is harming yourself and has a large potential to make less time for the fun stuff[0]. I'd be surprised if I'm alone in this, but a lot of stuff I enjoy now was stuff that originally frustrated me. IME this is pretty common! It's true for every person I know. Similarly, it's also true for things I learned that I thought I'd never use again. It always has a way of coming back.

I'm not going to pretend it's all fun and games. I'm explicitly saying it's not. But I'm confident in the long run it's better. Despite the lack of accuracy, I use LLMs (and Google, and even the TFM) like I would a solution guide the homework problems when I was in school. Try first, then consult. The struggle is an investment in your future. It sucks, but if all the best things in life were easy then we'd all have them. I'm just trying to convince you that it pays off.

I'm completely aware this is all context dependent. There's a time and place for everything. But given the percentages you mention (even taken as exaggeration), something sounds wrong. It's hard to suggest specific solutions without details but I'd be surprised if there weren't better and more rewarding solutions than having the LLM do it for you

[0] That's the big danger and what drives distrust in them. Because you need to work extra hard to find mistakes, increasing workload, not decreasing, because debugging is most of the job!

> How if it hallucinate and gives you wrong code

Then the code won't compile, or more likely your editor/IDE will say that it's invalid code. If you're using something like Cursor in agent mode, if invalid code is generated then it gets detected and the LLM keeps re-running until something is valid.

> It is better to read documentations and tutorials first.

I "trust" LLM's more than tutorials, there's so much garbage out there. For documentation, if the LLM suggests something, you can see the docstrings in your IDE. A lot of the time that's enough. If not, I usually go read the implementation if I _actually_ care about how something works, because you can't always trust documentation either.

I asked chatgpt mini something about godot, and often it gives erroneous answers.

So it causes developers to regularly fix what chatgpt is wrong about.

Not great.