41–50 of 226 posts
You're (they're?) not alone. This mirrors every experience I've had trying to give them a chance. I worry that I'm just speaking another language at this point. EDIT: Just to add context seeing other comments, I almost exclusively work in C++ on GPU drivers.
Well, it takes a while to learn Vim and then get value from it. It also takes a while to learn using an LLM and get value from it. The keys are how to build prompts, ways of working, and guidelines that help the AI stay focused. You end up spending much more time guiding and coaching rather than coding, that can take a while to get used to. Eventually though, you will master it and be able to write secure, fast code…
So you're taking an easy task, formal logic, and replacing it with a more difficult and time consuming task, babysitting a random number generator. How is that a net-positive?
Try
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> while I was watching TV This to me is one of the real benefits. I can vibe code watching TV. I can vibe code in bed. I can vibe code on the plane waiting for takeoff with GitHub Copilot Agents.
To me this is sad. I love programming. It was always a fun job. I don’t want to watch TV instead of programming.
I'm completely equally lost the other way. I've went through multiple phases of LLM usage for development. GPT3.5 era: wow this is amazing, oh. everything is hallucinated. not actually as useful as I first thought GPT4 era: very helpful as stackoverflow on steroids. Claude 3.5 Sonnet: have it open pretty much all the time, constantly asking questions and getting it to generate simple code (in the web UI) when it goes…
The problem is this is classic Gell Mann Amnesia. I can have it restyle my website with zero work, even adding StarCraft 2 or NBA Jam themes, but ask it to work in a planning or estimation problem and I'm annoyed by its quality. Its probably bad at both but I don't notice. If we have 10 specializations required on an app, I'm only mad about 10℅. If I want to make an app entirely outside my domain, yeah sure it's the best ever.
Putting aside the FOMO, the essential time tested strategy is simply to not care and follow what interests you. And the progress in AI is simply astonishing, it's inherently interesting, this shouldnt be hard. Don't go into with it with the expectation of "Unless it vibe coded and entire working application for me on it's a failure". Play with it. Poke it, prod it. Then try to resolve the quirks and problems that pop up. Why did it do that? Don't expect an outcome. Just let it happen. The people who do this now will be the ones to come through the hype bubble at the end with actual practical understanding and deployable skills.
Haven’t even really tried them. The sand is shifting way too fast. Once things stabilize and other people figure out how to really use them I’ll probably start but for now it just feels like effort that will have been wasted.
All the models feel a bit different to use, and part of being good with LLMs (I suspect) is being able to assess a model before you really start using it, and, learning the nuances in the models that you will use, for that alone I think it's worth spending time with them.
Sounds dubious to me
"All the SSRIs feel a bit different, and part of being good with SSRIs (I suspect) is being able to assess an SSRI before you really start using it, and, learning the nuances in the SSRIs that you will use, for that alone I think it's worth spending time with them"
Hm, that comparison sounds off, but not as much to me as to many other people.
"All the IDEs and text editors feel a bit different to use, and part of being good with IDEs (I suspect) is being able to assess an IDE before you really start using it, and, learning the nuances in the editors that you will use, for that alone I think it's worth spending time with them"
Sounds reasonable.
Substituting the subject back to AI coding agents, I'm struggling to make out your argument. What method of assessment would you recommend other than _starting to use_ a coding assistant model?
I guess you were referring to anecdats and reviews/posts, or were you referring to specific objective properties like context size, RAG capabilities etc?
I have a degree in CS from MIT and did professional software engineering from 2004 - 2020. I recently started a company in another field and haven’t done any real development for about 4 years. Earlier this summer I took a vacation and decided to start a small software hobby project specific to my industry. I decided to try out Cursor for the first time. I found it incredibly helpful at saving time implementing all t…
Last summer I came back to software after about 12 years away and I pretty much had an identical experience to you with using AI as a helper to come back. I've now spent the last 6 months coding as much as I can in between consulting gigs. I'm not sure if I would have been able to get caught up so quickly without AI. I haven't had this much fun programming since I was at university hacking away on sun workstations, b…
This sounds cool, any more details or any write up on how to do something like this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> while I was watching TV This to me is one of the real benefits. I can vibe code watching TV. I can vibe code in bed. I can vibe code on the plane waiting for takeoff with GitHub Copilot Agents.
To me this is sad. I love programming. It was always a fun job. I don’t want to watch TV instead of programming.
Lots of coding work is interesting, but plenty is just tedious.