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Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#181

Post by 15123123 »

solumunus wrote: post #117
15123123 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also interested in how much of these skills are at the mercy of OpenAI ? Like IIRC 1 or 2 years ago there was an uproar of AI "artists" saying that their art is ruined because of model changes ( or maybe the system prompt changed ). >I do not agree it is something you can pick up in an hour. But it's also interesting that the industry is selling the opposite ( with AI anyone can code / write / draw / make music…

OpenAI? They are far from the forefront here. No one is using their models for this.

You can substitute for whatever saas company of your choice.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#182

Post by cbsmith »

Terr_ wrote: post #148
cbsmith wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. ;-) I'm actually curious about the "lose their skills" angle though. In the open source community it's well understood that if anything reviewing a lot of code tends to sharpen your skills.

I expect that comes from the contrast and synthesis between how the author is anticipating things will develop or be explained, versus what the other person actually provided and trying to understand their thought process. What happens if the reader no longer has enough of that authorial instinct, their own (opinionated) independent understanding? I think the average experience would drift away from "I thought X was…

It seems counter intuitive that the reader would no longer have that authorial instinct due to lack of writing. Like, maybe they never had it, in which case, yes. But being exposed to a lot of different "writing opinions" tends to hone your own.

Let's say you're right though, and you lose that authorial instinct. If you've got five different proposals/PRs from five different models, each one critiqued by the other four, the needs for authorial instinct diminish significantly.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#183

Post by barsonme »

autobodie wrote: post #159
serpix wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding using AI tools for programming it is not a one-for-all choice. You can pick a grunt work task such as "Tag every such and such terraform resource with a uuid" and let it do just that. Nothing to do with quality but everything to do with a simple task and not having to bother with the tedium.

Why use AI to do something so simple? You're only increasing the possibility that it gets done wrong. Multi-cursor editing wil be faster anyway.

Why not? I regularly have a couple Claude instances running in the background chewing through simple yet time consuming tasks. It’s saved me many hours of work and given me more time to focus on the important parts.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#184

Post by socalgal2 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #180

> Another common argument I've heard is that Generative AI is helpful when you need to write code in a language or technology you are not familiar with. To me this also makes little sense. I'm not sure I get this one. When I'm learning new tech I almost always have questions. I used to google them. If I couldn't find an answer I might try posting on stack overflow. Sometimes as I'm typing the question their search wo…

To add, another experience I had. I was using an API I'm not that familiar with. My program was crashing. Looking at the stack trace I didn't see why. Maybe if I had many months experience with this API it would be obvious but it certainly wasn't to me. For fun I just copy and pasted the stack trace into Gemini. ~60 frames worth of C++. It immediately pointed out the likely cause given the API I was using. I fixed the bug with a 2 line change once I had that clue from the AI. That seems pretty useful to me. I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to find it otherwise since, as I said, I'm not that familiar with that API.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#185

Post by viraptor »

adastra22 wrote: post #162
viraptor wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There should be no difference between the mdc and the text in the prompt. Try something drastic like "All of responses should be in Chinese". If it doesn't happen, they're not included correctly. Otherwise, yeah, they work modulo the usual issues of prompt adherence.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#187

Post by turtlebits »

socalgal2 wrote: post #180

> Another common argument I've heard is that Generative AI is helpful when you need to write code in a language or technology you are not familiar with. To me this also makes little sense. I'm not sure I get this one. When I'm learning new tech I almost always have questions. I used to google them. If I couldn't find an answer I might try posting on stack overflow. Sometimes as I'm typing the question their search wo…

It's perfect for small boilerplate utilities. If I need a browser extension/tampermonkey script, I can get up and running quickly without having to read docs/write manifests. These are small projects where without AI, I wouldn't have bothered to even start.

At its least, AI can be extremely useful for autocompleting simple code logic or automatically finding replacements when I'm copying code/config and making small changes.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#188

Post by tptacek »

stitched2gethr wrote: post #177
tptacek wrote: post #106

I'm fine with anybody saying AI agents don't work for their work-style and am not looking to rebut this piece, but I'm going to take this opportunity to call something out. The author writes "reviewing code is actually harder than most people think. It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself". That sounds within an SD of true for me, to…

Why would you review agent generated code any differently than human generated code?

Because you don't care about the effort the agent took and can just ask for a do-over.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#189

Post by globnomulous »

kenjackson wrote: post #114
tptacek wrote: post #106

I'm fine with anybody saying AI agents don't work for their work-style and am not looking to rebut this piece, but I'm going to take this opportunity to call something out. The author writes "reviewing code is actually harder than most people think. It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself". That sounds within an SD of true for me, to…

I can read code much faster than I can write it. This might be the defining line for Gen AI - people who can read code faster will find it useful and those that write faster then they can read won’t use it.

> I can read code much faster than I can write it.

I have known and worked with many, many engineers across a wide range of skill levels. Not a single one has ever said or implied this, and in not one case have I ever found it to be true, least of all in my own case.

I don't think it's humanly possible to read and understand code faster than you can write and understand it to the same degree of depth. The brain just doesn't work that way. We learn by doing.

Re: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

#190

Post by aryehof »

These days, many programmers and projects are happy to leave testing and defect discovery to end users, under the guise of “but we have unit tests and CI”. That’s exacerbated when using LLM driven code with abandon.

The author is one who appears unwilling to do so.

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