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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

#71

Post by willtemperley »

pureliquidhw wrote: post #65
willtemperley wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short-term, automated tech debt creation will yield gains. Long term the craftsperson writing excellent code will win. It is now easier than ever to write excellent code, for those that are able to choose their pace.

Given it's 2025 and companies saddled with tech debt continue to prioritize speed of delivery over quality, I doubt the craftperson will win. If anything we'll see disposable systems (or parts) and the job of an SE will become even more like a plumber, connecting prebuilt business logic to prebuilt systems libraries. When one of those fails, have AI whip up a brand new one instead of troubleshooting the existing one(…

Yes there will be a class of developer like that, but it would only be considered winning if you're satisfied with climbing some artificial institutional hierarchy.

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

#72

Post by shermantanktop »

zwnow wrote: post #70
shermantanktop wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given that AI tools do not deliver well on barely understood fields one can only assume people work on simple things. Which is absolutely no shame. But people shouldn't expect these gains for their job if they work in less understood environments. Most non CRUD AI code implementations are flawed/horrendous.

That’s right, it’s good at things that are common. If your job is mostly filled with uncommon tasks, it won’t be good at helping you.

But for the rest of us, who have a mix of common/boring and uncommon/interesting tasks, accelerating the common ones means spending more time (proportionally) on less common tasks.

Unfortunately we don’t seem to great at classifying tasks as common or uncommon, and there are bored engineers who make complex solutions just to keep their brain occupied.

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

#73

Post by pureliquidhw »

willtemperley wrote: post #71
pureliquidhw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given it's 2025 and companies saddled with tech debt continue to prioritize speed of delivery over quality, I doubt the craftperson will win. If anything we'll see disposable systems (or parts) and the job of an SE will become even more like a plumber, connecting prebuilt business logic to prebuilt systems libraries. When one of those fails, have AI whip up a brand new one instead of troubleshooting the existing one(…

Yes there will be a class of developer like that, but it would only be considered winning if you're satisfied with climbing some artificial institutional hierarchy.

Indeed, the job of an SE is deviating further and further from code, much like how very few people write assembly anymore.

An earlier iteration of your reply said "Is that really winning?" The answer is no. I don't think any class of SE end up a winner here.

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

#74

Post by whatamidoingyo »

TrietNg wrote: post #69

I encounter a problem which is my social media usage increase. The time when you wait for the agent to write code is kinda silly :) You can not switch to do other things as it will make your focus shift away from the code. So usually I just dumb scroll for 1 minute

For me, it's 1 minute bullet chess.

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

#75

Post by rimunroe »

theshrike79 wrote: post #57
martin_a wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much what somebody else said: AI takes over simple tasks, the "fluff" around the business logic, error handling, stuff like that, so I can focus on doing the harder stuff at the core.

Exactly! 90% of what the average (or median) coder does isn't in any way novel or innovative. It's just API Glue in one form or another. The AI knows the patterns and can replicate the same endpoints and simple queries easily. Now you have more time to focus on the 10% that isn't just rehashing the same CRUD pattern.

> 90% of what the average (or median) coder does isn't in any way novel or innovative. It's just API Glue in one form or another.

I hear this from people extolling the virtue of AI a lot, but I have a very hard time believing it. I certainly wouldn't describe 90% of my coding work as boilerplate or API glue. If you're dealing with that volume of boilerplate/glue, isn't it incumbent upon you to try and find a way to remove that? Certainly sometimes it isn't feasible, but that seems like the exception encountered by people working on giant codebases with a very large number of contributors.

I don't think the work I do is innovative or even novel, but it is nuanced in a way I've seen Claude struggle with.

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

#76

Post by mythrwy »

It's hard to get in the zone with an LLM doing crazy stuff.

For instance this week when setting up a Django/Wagtail project GPT helpfully went ahead and created migration files in text instead of "makemigrations". Otherwise it did a bang up job and saved me a couple of hours.

Just no way I can get in the zone wrangling that kind of thing all day.

But I'm not sure getting in the coding zone frequently was all that mentally healthy so oh well.

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

#77

Post by yifanl »

willtemperley wrote: post #71
pureliquidhw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given it's 2025 and companies saddled with tech debt continue to prioritize speed of delivery over quality, I doubt the craftperson will win. If anything we'll see disposable systems (or parts) and the job of an SE will become even more like a plumber, connecting prebuilt business logic to prebuilt systems libraries. When one of those fails, have AI whip up a brand new one instead of troubleshooting the existing one(…

Yes there will be a class of developer like that, but it would only be considered winning if you're satisfied with climbing some artificial institutional hierarchy.

Climbing institutional hierarchy usually comes with being rewarded with more credits that I can trade for food, and I like eating food.

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

#78

Post by stuaxo »

dakiol wrote: post #50

What happened to coding for joy in your free time? At work I do whatever the company wants as long as I get my money at the end of the month. Java? Sure boss. Golang? Let’s do it. LLMs? Whatever you want. TDD? Yep. At home I still plan and devise my own worlds with joy. I may use LLMs for boring or repetitive tasks, or help or explanation; but I still can code better than the day before. As usual, work != career.

Even in the fun stuff there's dog work to do and the LLMs can definitely help there.

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

#79

Post by bravetraveler »

yifanl wrote: post #77
willtemperley wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes there will be a class of developer like that, but it would only be considered winning if you're satisfied with climbing some artificial institutional hierarchy.

Climbing institutional hierarchy usually comes with being rewarded with more credits that I can trade for food, and I like eating food.

Avocado toast strikes again
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