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The hidden cost of AI coding

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Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#141

Post by dxroshan »

Spivak wrote: post #128
dxroshan wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I've noticed in that respect is that I just read what it does and then immediately reason why it's there .... How if it hallucinate and gives you wrong code and explanation? It is better to read documentations and tutorials first.

Even when it hallucinates it still solves most of the unknown unknowns which is good for getting you unblocked. It's probably close enough to get some terms to search for.

I don't think so.How can you be so sure it solves the 'unknown unknowns'?

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#142

Post by elicksaur »

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.

Laughably narrow-minded projection of your own perspective on others.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#144

Post by ang_cire »

seper8 wrote: post #135
ang_cire wrote: post #133

This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI. Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.

>Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding Alright, please stop using SDK's, google, stackoverflow, any system libraries. You prefer to do it for yourself right?

If you're using those things to do *the core function* of the program you're writing, that's an issue.

SDKs and libraries are there to provide common (as in, used repeatedly, by many) functions that serve as BUILDING BLOCKS.

If you import a library and now your program is complete, then you didn't actually make a useful program, you just made a likely less efficient interface for the library.

BUT ALSO-

SDKs and libraries are *vetted* code. The advantage you are getting isn't just about it having been written for you, it's about the hundreds of hours of human code review, iteration, and thought, that goes into those libraries.

LLM code doesn't have that, so it's not about you benefitting from the knowledge and experience of others, it's purely about reducing personally-typed LoC.

And yes, if you're wholesale copy-pasting major portions of your program from stack overflow, I'd say that's about as bad as copy-pasting from ChatGPT.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#145

Post by bgwalter »

arvinsim wrote: post #137
ang_cire wrote: post #133

This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI. Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.

> Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding Have we forgotten that we advanced in software by building on the work of others?

They are not building on the work of others, they are taking the laundered work of others.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#146

Post by doix »

milesrout wrote: post #131
doix wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Plenty of incorrect code compiles. It is a very bad sign that people are making comments like "Then the code won't compile". As for my editor saying it is invalid..? That is just as untrustworthy as an LLM. >I "trust" LLM's more than tutorials, there's so much garbage out there. Yes, rubbish generated by AI. That is the rubbish out there. The stuff written by people is largely good.

> Plenty of incorrect code compiles. It is a very bad sign that people are making comments like "Then the code won't compile".

I interpreted the "hallucination" part as the AI using functions that don't exist. I don't consider that a problem because it's immediately obvious.

Yes, AI can suggest syntactically valid code that does the wrong thing. If it obviously does the wrong thing, then that's not really an issue either because it should be immediately obvious that it's wrong.

The problem is when it suggests something that is syntactically valid and looks like it works but is ever slightly wrong. But in my experience, it's pretty common to come across that stuff like that in "tutorials" as well.

> Yes, rubbish generated by AI. That is the rubbish out there. The stuff written by people is largely good.

I pretty strongly disagree. As soon as it became popular for developers to have a "brand", the amount of garbage started growing. The stuff written before the late 00's was mostly good, but after that the balance began slowly shifting towards garbage. AI definitely increased the rate at which garbage was generated though.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#147

Post by ltr_ »

in the meantime im having lots of fun coding and using AI, reinventing every wheel i can. 0 stress cos i don't do it for money :). I think a lot of people are having a tantrum because programing is not sexy anymore, its getting easier, the bar is lower now , the quality is awful and nobody cares. its like any other boring soul crushing job.

also if you want to see the real cost (at least part of it) of AI coding or the whole fucked up IT industry, go to any mining town in the global south.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#148

Post by wvh »

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…

I think the fear for those of us who love coding, stability and security, that we are going to be confronted with apples that are rotten on the inside and our work, our love, is going to turn (even more so) into pain. The challenge in computing is that the powers that decide have little overview over the actual quality and longevity of any endeavour.

I work as a consultant assessing other people's code and it's hard not to lose my religion, sort of speak.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#149

Post by ang_cire »

arvinsim wrote: post #137
ang_cire wrote: post #133

This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI. Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.

> Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding Have we forgotten that we advanced in software by building on the work of others?

This belies the way that LLM code is being used.

People aren't taking LLM code and then thoughtfully refactoring and improving it, they're using it to *avoid* doing that, by treating the generated code as though it's already had that done.

That's why the pro-LLM-code people in this very thread are talking about using it to automate away the parts of the coding they don't like. You really think they're then going to go back and improve on the code past it minimally working?

There will be no advancement from that, just mediocre or bad code going unreviewed and ignored until it breaks.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#150

Post by johngladtj »

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…

This.

Frankly I don't want to spend 2 hours reading documentation just to find out some arcane incantation that gets the computer to do what I want it to do.

The interesting part of programming to me is designing the logic. It's the 'this, then that, except when this' flow that I'm really interested in, not the search for some obscure library that has some function that will parse this csv.

Llms are great for that, and let me get away from the pointless grind and into the things that I enjoy and are actually providing value.

The pair programming is also a super good thing. I work best when I can spitball and throw out random ideas and get quick feedback. Llms let me do that without bothering others who have their own work to do.

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