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AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

praf.me

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Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#31

Post by darkwater »

foo42 wrote: post #30

The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day. I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy t…

> The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.

That's why we should be against it but hey, we can provide more value to shareholders!

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#32

Post by energy123 »

cluckindan wrote: post #23
energy123 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm slowed down (but perhaps sped up overall due to lower rewrites/maintenance costs) on important bits because the space of possibilities/capabilities is expanded, and I'm choosing to make use of that for some load bearing pieces that need to be durable and high quality (along the metrics that I care about). It takes extra time to search that space properly rather than accept the first thing that compiles and passes…

How do you know they’re durable and high quality?

I do it based on my subjective judgement, somewhat informed by quantitative measurements of metrics I care about like throughput.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#33

Post by shermantanktop »

zwnow wrote: post #9
p0w3n3d wrote: post #7

Absolutely—I feel like I can ship at a crazy velocity now, like I have a team of interns at my disposal to code up my every silly demand. It reminds me this scene: `Cut my eggs` `Your eggs are cut sir!' `Cut my milk' `I can't sir, it's liquid' `Imbecile! Freeze it, then cut it!'

> Absolutely—I feel like I can ship at a crazy velocity now, like I have a team of interns at my disposal to code up my every silly demand. I also wonder what type of simple CRUD apps people build that have such a performance gain? They must be building well understood projects or be incredible slow developers for LLMs to have such an impact, as I cant relate to this at all.

Different people have different jobs doing different things? Doesn’t seem shocking to me.

But I certainly wouldn’t assume that other people’s jobs are simple or boring just because they don’t look like yours.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#34

Post by mckn1ght »

mac-mc wrote: post #24

I found I couldn't listen to music with words in them while coding. Maybe try wordless music, or music that is in a language you don't understand.

Exactly, came here to say this, it happened long ago for me. Classical, jazz, electronica… all great for coding and vibing alike, for me.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#35

Post by ForHackernews »

energy123 wrote: post #28

> writing a blurb that contains the same mental model Good nugget. Effective prompting, aside from context curation, is about providing the LLM with an approximation of your world model and theory, not just a local task description. This includes all your unstated assumptions, interaction between system and world, open questions, edge cases, intents, best practices, and so on. Basically distill the shape of the probl…

Hard to tell if this is parody or not but I chuckled at the idea of replacing tedious programming with a "simple stream" of handwritten XML.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#36

Post by latexr »

foo42 wrote: post #30

The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day. I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy t…

> The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.

That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR10t-B9nYY

> I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy the gains first or not.

That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#37

Post by mckn1ght »

It’s a lot more high-level executive functioning now, instead of grinding through endless syntax and boilerplate. Easy to mindlessly code to music, much harder to think about what you want to do next, and evaluate if the result you just got is what you really wanted.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#38

Post by CalRobert »

october8140 wrote: post #8

What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?

Random example:

I set up a model in DBT that has 100 columns. I need to generate a schema for it (old tools could do this) with appropriate tests and likely data types (old tools struggled with this). AI is really good at this sort of thing.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#39

Post by ahoka »

From the masterpiece, Tragedy of the Man, describing the future where everything is done in the name of efficiency:

THE GREYBEARD You left your workroom in great disarray.

MICHELANGELO Because I had to fabricate the chair-legs To the quality as poor as it can be. I appeal’d for long, let me modificate, Let me engrave some ornaments on it.

They did not permit. I wanted as a chance The chair-back to change but all was in vain. I was very close to be a madman And I left the pains and my workroom, too. (stands back)

THE GREYBEARD You get house arrest for this disorder And will not enjoy this nice and warm day.

Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

#40

Post by energy123 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #35
energy123 wrote: post #28

> writing a blurb that contains the same mental model Good nugget. Effective prompting, aside from context curation, is about providing the LLM with an approximation of your world model and theory, not just a local task description. This includes all your unstated assumptions, interaction between system and world, open questions, edge cases, intents, best practices, and so on. Basically distill the shape of the probl…

Hard to tell if this is parody or not but I chuckled at the idea of replacing tedious programming with a "simple stream" of handwritten XML.

It's not parody. I'm trying to provide the LLM with what's missing, which is a theory of how the system fits into the world: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

Without this it defaults to being ignorant about the trade-offs that you care about, or the relevant assumptions you're making which you think are obvious but really aren't.

The "simple stream" aspect is that each task I give to the LLM is narrowly scoped, and I don't want to put all aspects of the relevant theory that pertains just to that one narrow task into a more formal centralized doc. It's better off as an ephemeral part of the prompt that I can delete after the task is done. But I also do have more formal docs that describe the shared parts of the theory that every prompt will need access to, which is fed in as part of the normal context.

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