Will we be having these conversations for the next decade?
It’s the new “I use Vim/Emacs/Ed over IDE”.
Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
161–170 of 464 posts
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#162> But interns learn and get better over time. The time that you spend reviewing code or providing feedback to an intern is not wasted, it is an investment in the future. The intern absorbs the knowledge you share and uses it for new tasks you assign to them later on. This is the piece that confuses me about the comparison to a junior or an intern. Humans learn about the business, the code, the history of the system.…
You don't have to reexplain the business context. Save it to the mdc file if it's important. The added benefit is that the next real person looking at the code can also use that to learn - it's actually cool for having good up to date documentation is now an asset.
Do you find your agent actually respecting the mdc file? I don’t.
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#163I simply don't like the code it writes. Whenever I try using llms, it is like wrestling for conciseness. Terrible code which is almost certainly 1/10 error or "extras" I don't need. At this point I am simply using it to motivate me to move forward.
Writing a bunch of orm code feels boring? I make it generate the code and edit. Importing data? I just make it generate inserts. New models are good at reformatting data.
Using a third party Library? I force it to look up every function doc online and it still has errors.
Adding transforms and pivots to sql while keeping to my style? It is a mess. Forget it. I do that by hand.
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#164It's a bit like going from assembly to C++, except we don't have good rigid rules for high-level program specification. If we had a rigid "high-level language" to express programs, orders or magnitude more high-level than C++ and other, than we could maybe evaluate it for correctness and get 100% output reliability, perhaps. All the languages I picked up, I picked them up when they were at least 10 years old. I'm trying to use AI a bit these days for programming, but it feels like what it must have felt like using C++ when it just came available; promising but not usable (yet?) for most programming situations.
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#165You could argue that AI-generated code is a black box, but let's adjust our perspective here. When was the last time you thoroughly reviewed the source code of a library you imported? We already work with black boxes daily as we evaluate libraries by their interfaces and behaviors, not by reading every line. The distinction isn't whether code comes from AI or humans, but how we integrate and take responsibility for i…
These days, I review external dependencies pretty thoroughly. I did not use to. This is because of AI slop though.
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The conversations will climb the ladder and narrow. Eventually: well, but, the AI coding agent isn't better than a top 10%/5%/1% software developer. And it'll be that the coding agents can't do narrow X thing better than a top tier specialist at that thing. The skeptics will forever move the goal posts.
If the AI actually outperforms humans in the full context of the work, then no, we won't. It will be so much cheaper and faster that businesses won't have to argue at all. Those that adopt them will massively outcompetes those that don't. However, assuming we are still having this conversation, that alone is proof to me that the AI is not that capable. We're several years into "replace all devs in six months." We wil…
> If the AI actually outperforms humans in the full context of the work, then no, we won't.
IDEs outperform any “dumb” editor in full context of work. You don’t see any less posts about “I use Vim, btw” (and I say this as Vim user).
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#167AI models are fundamentally trained on patterns from existing data - they learn to recognize and reproduce successful solution templates rather than derive solutions from foundational principles. When faced with a problem, the model searches for the closest match in its training experience rather than building up from basic assumptions and logical steps. Human experts excel at first-principles thinking precisely beca…
So are people. People are trained on existing data and learn to reproduce known solutions. They also take this to the meta level—a scientist or engineer is trained on methods for approaching new problems which have yielded success in the past. AI does this too. I’m not sure there is actually a distinction here..
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#168> For every new task this "AI intern" resets back to square one without having learned a thing! I guess the author is not aware of Cursor rules, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, etc. Task-list oriented rules specifically help with long term context.
You can lead a horse to the documentation, but you can't make him think.
Think is means to an end, not the end goal.
Or are you talking about OP not knowing AI tools enough?
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#169> The truth that may be shocking to some is that open source contributions submitted by users do not really save me time either, because I also feel I have to do a rigorous review of them. This truly is shocking. If you are reviewing every single line of every package you intend to use how do you ever write any code?
That’s not what he said. He said he reviews every line of every pull request he receives to his own projects. Wouldn’t you?
Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me
#170It would be interesting to see which is faster/better in competitive coding, the human coder or the human using AI to assist in coding.
It already happened. Last year AI submissions completely destroyed AoC, as far as I remember.