Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by tsurba » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 7:40 AM UTC

suddenlybananas wrote: post #193

dr_dshiv wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s mostly attitude that you are learning. Playfulness, persistence and a willingness to start from scratch again and again.

>persistence and a willingness to start from scratch again and again. i.e. continually gambling and praying the model spits something out that works instead of thinking.

Gambling is where I end up if I’m tired and try to get an LLM to build my hobby project for me from scratch in one go, not really bothering to read the code properly. It’s stupid and a waste of time. Sometimes it’s easier to get started this way though.

But more seriously, in the ideal case refining a prompt based on a misunderstanding of an LLM due to ambiguity in your task description is actually doing the meaningful part of the work in software development. It is exactly about defining the edge cases, and converting into language what is it that you need for a task. Iterating on that is not gambling.

But of course if you are not doing that, but just trying to get a ”smarter” LLM with (hopefully deprecated study of) ”prompt engineering” tricks, then that is about building yourself a skill that can become useless tomorrow.

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

#222

Post by nottorp » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 7:41 AM UTC

socalgal2 wrote: post #184

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 th…

You remember when Google used to do the same thing for you way before "AI"?

Okay, maybe sometimes the post about the stack trace was in Chinese, but a plain search used to be capable of giving the same answer as a LLM.

It's not that LLMs are better, it's search that got entshittified.

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

#223

Post by nottorp » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 7:46 AM UTC

nikanj wrote: post #198

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…

And ChatGPT never closes your question without answer because it (falsely) thinks it's a duplicate of a different question from 13 years ago

But it does give you a ready to copy paste answer instead of a 'teach the man how to fish' answer.

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

#224

Post by Philpax » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 7:46 AM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #222

socalgal2 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

You remember when Google used to do the same thing for you way before "AI"? Okay, maybe sometimes the post about the stack trace was in Chinese, but a plain search used to be capable of giving the same answer as a LLM. It's not that LLMs are better, it's search that got entshittified.

Google has never identified the logical error in a block of code for me. I could find what an error code was, yes, but it's of very little help when you don't have a keyword to search.

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

#225

Post by Philpax » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 7:49 AM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #199

barsonme wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> a couple Claude instances running in the background chewing through simple yet time consuming tasks. If you don't mind, I'd love to hear more about this. How exactly are they running the background? What are they doing? How do you interact with them? Do they have access to your file system? Thank you!

I would guess that they're running multiple instances of Claude Code [0] in the background. You can give it arbitrary tasks up to a complexity ceiling that you have to figure out for yourself. It's a CLI agent, so you can just give it directives in the relevant terminal. Yes, they have access to the filesystem, but only what you give them.

[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code

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

#226

Post by dspillett » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 7:50 AM UTC

waprin wrote: post #19

To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing, so it's not surprising that some people are better at one than the other. The author is basically saying that he's much better at coding than AI coding. But it's important to realize that AI coding is itself a skill that you can develop. It's not just , pick the best tool and let it go. Managing prompts and managing context has a much higher ski…

> To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing

LLM-based¹ coding, at least beyond simple auto-complete enhancements (using it directly & interactively as what it is: Glorified Predictive Text) is more akin to managing a junior or outsourcing your work. You give a definition/prompt, some work is done, you refine the prompt and repeat (or fix any issues yourself), much like you would with an external human. The key differences are turnaround time (in favour of LLMs), reliability (in favour of humans, though that is mitigated largely by the quick turnaround), and (though I suspect this is a limit that will go away with time, possibly not much time) lack of usefulness for "bigger picture" work.

This is one of my (several) objections to using it: I want to deal with and understand the minutia of what I am doing, I got into programming, database bothering, and infrastructure kicking, because I enjoyed it, enjoyed learning it, and wanted to do it. For years I've avoided managing people at all, at the known expense of reduced salary potential, for similar reasons: I want to be a tinkerer, not a manager of tinkerers. Perhaps call me back when you have an AGI that I can work alongside.

--------

[1] Yes, I'm a bit of a stick-in-the-mud about calling these things AI. Next decade they won't generally be considered AI like many things previously called AI are not now. I'll call something AI when it is, or very closely approaches, AGI.

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

#227

Post by FranzFerdiNaN » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 7:54 AM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #222

socalgal2 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

You remember when Google used to do the same thing for you way before "AI"? Okay, maybe sometimes the post about the stack trace was in Chinese, but a plain search used to be capable of giving the same answer as a LLM. It's not that LLMs are better, it's search that got entshittified.

It was just as likely that Google would point you towards a stackoverflow question that was closed because it was considered a duplicate of a completely different question.

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

#228

Post by tsurba » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 7:57 AM UTC

didibus wrote: post #136

wiseowise wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re twisting results. Just because they took more time doesn’t mean their productivity went down. On the contrary, if you can perform expert task with much less mental resources (which 99% of orgs should prioritize for) then it is an absolute win. Work is extremely mentally draining and soul crushing experience for majority of people, if AI can lower that while maintaining roughly same result with subjects allocat…

If I follow what you are saying, employers won't see any benefits, but employees, while they will take the same time and create the same output in the same amount of time, will be able to do so at a reduced mental strain? Personally, I don't know if this is always a win, mostly because I enjoy the creative and problem solving aspect of coding, and reducing that to something that is more about prompting, correcting, a…

And how long have you been doing this? Because that sounds naive.

After doing programming for a decade or two, the actual act of programming is not enough to be ”creative problem solving”, it’s the domain and set of problems you get to apply it to that need to be interesting.

>90% of programming tasks at a company are usually reimplementing things and algorithms that have been done a thousand times before by others, and you’ve done something similar a dozen times. Nothing interesting there. That is exactly what should and can now be automated (to some extent).

In fact solving problems creatively to keep yourself interested, when the problem itself is boring is how you get code that sucks to maintain for the next guy. You should usually be doing the most clear and boring implementation possible. Which is not what ”I love coding” -people usually do (I’m definitely guilty).

To be honest this is why I went back to get a PhD, ”just coding” stuff got boring after a few years of doing it for a living. Now it feels like I’m just doing hobby projects again, because I work exactly on what I think could be interesting for others.

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

#229

Post by omnicognate » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 7:58 AM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #172

autobodie wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's wrong. I only have to write code once, maybe twice. But when using AI agents, I have to read many (5? 10? I will always give up before 15) PRs before finding one close enough that I won't have to rewrite all of it. This nonsense has not saved me any time, and the process is miserable. I also haven't found any benefit in aiming for smaller or larger PRs. The aggregare efficiency seems to even out becaus…

I only generate the code once with GenAI and typically fix a bug or two - or at worst use its structure. Rarely do I toss a full PR. It’s interesting some folks can use them to build functioning systems and others can’t get a PR out of them.

The problem is that at this stage we mostly just have people's estimates of their own success to go on, and nobody thinks they're incompetent. Nobody's going to say "AI works really well for, me but I just pump out dross my colleagues have to fix" or "AI doesn't work for me but I'm an unproductive, burnt out hack pretending I'm some sort of craftsman as the world leaves me behind".

This will only be resolved out there in the real world. If AI turns a bad developer, or even a non-developer, into somebody that can replace a good developer, the workplace will transform extremely quickly.

So I'll wait for the world to prove me wrong but my expectation, and observation so far, is that AI multiplies the "productivity" of the worst sort of developer: the ones that think they are factory workers who produce a product called "code". I expect that to increase, not decrease, the value of the best sort of developer: the ones who spend the week thinking, then on Friday write 100 lines of code, delete 2000 and leave a system that solves more problems than it did the week before.

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

#230

Post by socalgal2 » Tue, Jun 17, 2025, 7:59 AM UTC

plasticeagle wrote: post #206

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…

ChatGPT and Gemini literally only know the answer because they read StackOverflow. Stack Overflow only exists because they have visitors. What do you think will happen when everyone is using the AI tools to answer their questions? We'll be back in the world of Encyclopedias, in which central authorities spent large amounts of money manually collecting information and publishing it. And then they spent a good amount o…

> ChatGPT and Gemini literally only know the answer because they read StackOverflow. Stack Overflow only exists because they have visitors.

I know this isn't true because I work on an API that has no answers on stackoverflow (too new), nor does it have answers anywhere else. Yet, the AI seems to able to accurately answer many questions about it. To be honest I've been somewhat shocked at this.