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

151–160 of 475 posts

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#151

Post by ohgr »

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?

I spend most of my time fixing that shit.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#152

Post by voidUpdate »

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…

> The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing

I keep seeing people saying to use an LLM to write boilerplate, but like... do you not just copy that from another project where you already wrote it?

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#153

Post by brigandish »

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.

If devs would learn how to document their work properly then there'd be much less use for AI and more people who enjoyed coding.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#154

Post by brigandish »

dxroshan wrote: post #117
melvinroest wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Even more so, I remember making a Chrome extension and feeling intimidated. I knew that I'd be comfortable with most of it given that JS is used but I just didn't know how to start. With an LLM it is way faster to spin up some default config and get going versus…

> 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.

Most tutorials fail to add meta info like the system they're using and versions of things, that can be a real pain.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#156

Post by pjmlp »

> After all, if we lose the joy in our craft, what exactly are we optimizing for?

For being one of the few lucky ones that gets to stay around taking care of the software factory robots, or designing them, while everyone else that used to work at the factory is now queueing somewhere else.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#157

Post by Spivak »

dxroshan wrote: post #141
Spivak wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

Because I've used it for problems where it hallucinated some code that didn't actually exist but that was good enough to know what the right terms to search for in the docs were.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#158

Post by insin »

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.

Every PR I have to review with an obviously LLM-generated title stuffed with adjectives, and a useless description containing an inaccurate summary of the code changes pushes me a little bit more into trying to make my side projects profitable in the hope that one takes off. It usually only gets worse from there.

Documentation needs to be by humans for humans, it's not a box that's there to be filled with slop.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#159

Post by RedNifre »

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.

Right, just how back in the day, people who loved writing assembly hated high level languages and people who found assembly too tedious loved compilers.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#160

Post by pjmlp »

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?

No, problem is when others are no longer needed, a machine gets to do everything, and only a few selected humans get to take care of the replicator machine.
Post reply on HN