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AI coding tools can reduce productivity

secondthoughts.ai

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Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#231

Post by marhee »

Fraterkes wrote: post #153

I think the dichotomy you see with how positive people are about ai has almost entirely to do with the kind of questions they ask. That seems obvious, but a consequence of that is that people who are sceptical of ai (like me) only use it when they've exhausted other resources (like google). You ask very specific questions where not a lot of documentation is available and inevetably even o3 ends up being pretty useles…

Well, I use it before google, since it in general summarizes webpages and removes the ads. Quite handy. It’s also very useful to check if you understand something correctly. And for programming specifically I found it really useful to help naming stuff (which tends to be hard not in the least place because it’s subjective).

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#232

Post by gtsop »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #122
gtsop wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cringe when I see these numbers. 20 times better means that you can accomplish in two months what you would do in 4 years, which is ridiculus when said out loud. We can make it even more ridiculous by pointing out you would do in 3 years the work of working lifetime (60 years) I am wondering, what sort of tasks are you seeing these x20 boost?

Maybe writing made up HN comments?

I am honestly convinced these are AI comments. They fail to answer the question of what sort of work they see the x20 improvements, just like Chatgpt fails to answer my hard technical questions.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#233

Post by gtsop »

baq wrote: post #83
gtsop wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cringe when I see these numbers. 20 times better means that you can accomplish in two months what you would do in 4 years, which is ridiculus when said out loud. We can make it even more ridiculous by pointing out you would do in 3 years the work of working lifetime (60 years) I am wondering, what sort of tasks are you seeing these x20 boost?

It isn’t ridiculous, it’s easily true, especially when you’re experienced in general, but have little to no knowledge of this particular big piece of tech, like say you’ve stopped doing frontend when jquery was all there was and you’re coming back. I’m doing things with react in hours I would have no business doing in weeks a couple years ago.

I am waiting to see your 4 year human-equivalent project in a couple of months.

Words without actions are junk. You are asserting something you have no proof for. Proove it then. Amaze us all with your productivity, out in the open. Shred those pilled up open issues on open source projects and then give us a report of how fast-easy it.

If it is "easily true" you'll be done by next month

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#234

Post by gtsop »

latexr wrote: post #170
calrain wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably am a fool :) 10x to 20x is in relation to time, so something that would have taken 2 weeks (80 hours) would be done in 8 hours to be 10x.

Which means you should be perfectly capable of answering two of the three scenarios the other user posed: > Do you clock off at Monday lunchtime and spend the rest of the week playing video games? Did your boss fire nineteen developers and give their jobs to you? In other words, how are you taking advantage of all that extra time you claim to have?

He is probably just a bot

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#235

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #172
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of that, may be what we measure “product” to be. My entire life, I have written “ship” software. It’s been pretty easy to say what my “product” is. But I have also worked at a fairly small scale, in very small teams (often, only me). I was paid to manage a team, but it was a fairly small team, with highly measurable output. Personally, I have been writing software as free, open-source stuff, and it was easy to m…

> When I ask ChatGPT (for example) for a code solution, I find that it’s usually quite “naive” (pretty prolix). I usually end up rewriting it. That doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing, though. It gives me a useful “starting point,” and can save me several hours of experimenting. The usual counter-point is that if you (commonly) write code by experimenting, you are doing it wrong. Better think the problem through, and the…

BTW: I guess I should be a bit more forthcoming about the way that I work. I know that we are always looking to ding others for not working the way that we do, but I find my way works for me, quite well. I won't tell other people that they are wrong, unless they are working for me. I am constantly learning new techniques and approaches, by staying open to, and observing, how others do things. I learn from the examples set forth by others; even ones that do things in a way that I may initially disapprove of.

"Experimenting" is a vital part of my process. I call it "Evolutionary Design,"[0] and it involves a lot of iteration. I have found that it's vital to UI[1], because I can almost never predict how UI will act, when actually presented to the user. The same goes for a lot of communication workflows. I have to "run it up the flagpole, and see who salutes." I almost always find that my theorized approach has issues, and I need to make changes. The old "Measure twice; cut once" approach to software development has caused me great trouble, over the years, and I have found that I need to adjust to new tools, and new contexts.

For example, right now, I am revamping one of my UI widgets[2]. It started as a minor tweak for iOS26, but I realized that it's a bit "long in the tooth," and that I can make it more robust, simple, and usable. I have been running the test harness all morning, seeing issues, and going back to the code, and tweaking.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/evolutionary-design-specificati...

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/the-road-most-traveled-by/

[2] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Checkbox

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#236

Post by benreesman »

danielbln wrote: post #213
benreesman wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't fuck with Docker jank and cloud jank and shit. I don't fuck with dynamic linking. I don't fuck with lagged-ass electron apps. I don't fuck with package managers that need a SAT solver but don't have one. That's all going to be a hard no from me dawg. When I said that after you've done all the other stuff, I was including cutting all the ridiculous bullshit that's been foisted on an entire generation of…

Ok, that's great for you. Most of us don't have the luxury of going full Richard Stallmann in their day to day and are more than happy to have some of the necessary grunt work to be automated away.

I live in the same world as everyone else and have to make a living same as anyone else.

Lagged-ass electron apps are a choice: run neovim or emacs or zed, I have Cursor installed, once in a while I need vscode for something, but how often is someone dictating my editor?

I have to target OCI container platforms for work sometimes, that's what Arion and nix2container are for. Ditto package managers: uv and bun exist and can interact with legacy requirements.txt and package.json in most cases.

Anything from a Helm chart to the configuration for ddagent can be written from nixlang and into a .deb.

My current job has a ton of Docker on GCE running TypeScript, I have to emit compatible code and configuration, but no one stands over my shoulders to make sure I'm doing the Cloud Approved jank path or having a bash script or Haskell program print it. I have a Jank Stack Compatibility Layer that builds all that nonsense.

Job after job there's a little setup cost and people look at me funny, 6 months in my desk is an island of high-velocity sanity people are starting to use because I carry a "glory days FAANG" toolkit around and compile reasonable plain text into whatever ripoff cloud garbage is getting pimped this week.

It's a pretty extreme workplace where you can't run reasonable Unix on your own machine and submit compiler output instead of typing for the truly mandatory jank integration points.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#237

Post by marcellus23 »

Fraterkes wrote: post #181
rsanheim wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that dichotomy is true at all, at least not with experienced software people. Many folks I know are skeptical of the hype, or maybe full on anti/distrustful, due to reasons I think are valid. But many of those same people have tried llm tools, maybe chatgpt or copilot or cursor, and recognize the value even w/ huge misgivings. Some of have gone further with tools like claude code and seen the real poten…

I obviously don't mean that people literally write "write me some typescript", because nobody wants code that does something arbitrary. I'm also not saying that every reaction to ai falls between love and skeptical: I wrote a 3 sentence comment on a complex topic to sketch out an idea. The tone of your comment suggests that my comment upset you, which wasn't my intent. But you have to try to be a little generous when…

Ironically, his comment does not come off at all as offended, but yours does.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#238

Post by danielbln »

whatagreatboy wrote: post #222
Fraterkes wrote: post #153

I think the dichotomy you see with how positive people are about ai has almost entirely to do with the kind of questions they ask. That seems obvious, but a consequence of that is that people who are sceptical of ai (like me) only use it when they've exhausted other resources (like google). You ask very specific questions where not a lot of documentation is available and inevetably even o3 ends up being pretty useles…

It's kind of true. I only use it for simple stuff that I don't have time for. For example, how to write a simple diagram in tikz. The Ai does the simple and busywork of providing a good enough approximation which I can tweak and get what I want. For hard questions, I prefer to use my own skills, because AI often regurgitates what I'm already aware. I still ask AI in the off-chance it comes up with something cool, but…

I find that in the latter case its at least a serviceable rubber duck.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#239

Post by dismalaf »

handfuloflight wrote: post #150
dismalaf wrote: post #54

I find LLMs are decent at regurgitating boilerplate. Basically the same kind of stuff you could google then copy-paste... AI chatbots, now that they have web access, are also good at going over documentation and save you a little time searching through the docs yourself. They're not great at business logic though, especially if you're doing anything remotely novel. Which is the difficult part of programming anyway. B…

This isn't true, and I know it by what I'm working on and sorry, I'm not at liberty to give more details. But I see how untrue this is, every working hour of every day.

You say more details as if you gave any to begin with...

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#240

Post by dmonitor »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #201
Fraterkes wrote: post #153

I think the dichotomy you see with how positive people are about ai has almost entirely to do with the kind of questions they ask. That seems obvious, but a consequence of that is that people who are sceptical of ai (like me) only use it when they've exhausted other resources (like google). You ask very specific questions where not a lot of documentation is available and inevetably even o3 ends up being pretty useles…

I think you touched on an important aspect, but did not explore it further. If we accept that AI is a tool, then then problem is the nature of the tool as it will vary heavily from individual to individual. This partially accounts for the ridiculous differences from self reported accounts of people, who use it on a regular basis. And then, there is a possibility that my questions are not that unusual and/or are well…

The thing about tools is that they need to be predictable. I can't remember the source, but it's a concept I read that really stuck with me. A predictable tool can be used skillfully and accurately because the user can anticipate how it works and deploy it effectively. It will always be aligned with the user intent because the user decides how and when it is used.

A tool that constantly adapts to how it is used will frequently be misaligned with user intent. Language models constantly change their own behavior based on the specific phrasing you gave it, the context you deployed it in, and the inherent randomness in token generation. Its capacity to be used as a tool will be inherently limited by this unpredictability.

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