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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

#141

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jwr wrote: post #49

In my experience, listening to music engages the creative part of your brain and severely limits what you can do, but this is not readily apparent. If I listen to music, I can spend an hour CODING YEAH! and be all smug and satisfied, until I turn the music off and discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal. I just didn't see it, because the creative part of…

I don't think that's down to music per se, but a more generalized thing. Software developers love being in a flow state, some of them pursue it all the time (...guilty) and get frustrated when their job changes (e.g. moving towards management) so they spend less time in that flow state.

But also, this can create waste, in that people write the Best Code Ever in their flow state (while listening music or not), but... it wasn't necessary in the first place and the time spent was a waste. This can waste anything from an hour to six months of work (honestly, I had a "CTO" once who led a team of three dozen people or so who actually went into his batcave at home for six months to write a C# framework of sorts that the whole company should use. He then quit and became self-employed so the company had to re-hire him to make sense of the framework he wrote. I'm sure he enjoyed it very much though.)

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

#142

Post by baq »

codr7 wrote: post #120
baq wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t it be possible if meat computers can do it more or less reliably? The construction of such a machine is a matter of time; whether it’s a year or a century is anyone’s guess. When it is eventually made, though… it’s either aligned or we’re in trouble. Job cushiness will be P2 or P3 in a world where a computer can do everything economically viable better than any human.

Speak for yourself, I'm not a computer.

Your opinion on the matter is not relevant whether you are or aren't one. Besides, if our brains aren't computers, what are they?

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

#143

Post by alansammarone »

codr7 wrote: post #120
baq wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t it be possible if meat computers can do it more or less reliably? The construction of such a machine is a matter of time; whether it’s a year or a century is anyone’s guess. When it is eventually made, though… it’s either aligned or we’re in trouble. Job cushiness will be P2 or P3 in a world where a computer can do everything economically viable better than any human.

Speak for yourself, I'm not a computer.

Turing machines are universal. Anything that does anything is, at most, a Turing machine.

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

#144

Post by r_lee »

specproc wrote: post #93
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 most challenging thing I'm finding about working with LLM-based tools is the reduction in enjoyment. I'm in this business because I love it, and I'm worried about that going forward.

Yup. not sure if it's just me but the trend seems to be just ship slop as fast as you can, nothing else matters, just ship ship ship

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

#145

Post by gibagger »

hudon wrote: post #112
codr7 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, not until AI is writing high quality, maintainable software; and no one knows if that's even possible yet.

What caused textile machines to replace the manual labor wasn’t the quality of their output, it was quantity. In fact, manually made clothing was of higher quality than what was machine-produced.

A low quality fabric makes the fashion police come and arrest you.

Low quality software kills people.

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

#147

Post by ramesh31 »

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.

This is precisely the question that scares me now. It is always so satisfying when a revolution occurs to hold hands and hug each other in the streets and shout "death to the old order". But what happens the next morning? Will we capture this monumental gain for labor or will we cede it to capital? My money is on the latter. Why wouldn't it be? Did they let us go home early when the punch card looms weaved months worth of hand work in a day? No, they made us work twice as hard for half the pay.

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

#148

Post by lvnfg »

deadbabe wrote: post #136
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…

If there are 8 days per day worth of work to be done (which I doubt), why wouldn’t you want to have it done ASAP? You’re going to have to do it eventually, so why not just do it now? Doesn’t make sense. You act like they’re just making up new work for you to do when previously there wouldn’t have been any.

Yes, work will expand to fill all your available hours due to unaligned incentives between who does the work (the SWE in this example) and who decide the quantity, timeline, and cost of work.

If the SWE can finish his work faster, 8x faster in this case, then backlogs will also be pushed to complete 8x faster by the project manager. If there are no backlogs, new features will be required at 8x faster / more by sales team / clients. If no new features are needed, pressures will be made until costs are 8x lower by finance. If there are no legal, moral, competitive, or physical constraints, the process should continue until either there’s only a single dev working on all his available time, or less time but for considerably less salary.

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

#150

Post by guappa »

deadbabe wrote: post #136
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…

If there are 8 days per day worth of work to be done (which I doubt), why wouldn’t you want to have it done ASAP? You’re going to have to do it eventually, so why not just do it now? Doesn’t make sense. You act like they’re just making up new work for you to do when previously there wouldn’t have been any.

The reward for being faster is to do more work.
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