191–200 of 256 posts
I'm not going to speculate about the intent and goals of this post and blog, just note that a small sample of posts I've read trigger disagreement for every statement at least for me.
Top comments here also express strong disagreement with multiple statements in the post.
That opening caricature was so off-putting and dismissive (and extremely wrong, that's not at all what the discourse is about generally speaking), I failed to conclude the reading session. One does not need to embrace a tool to recognize its horrendous effects and side-effects. I can critique assault rifles without ever having handled one. I can critique street narcotics without taking drugs, and I can critique nucle…
The OP doest't even deserve your sincere and just to the point response.
Write a blog post about with an intent to shame software engineers who dismiss AI, but never do it openly, pretending to be a direction for engineers who are on a wrong path. Propose a series of titles to make it even look worse for such engineers, but not openly offensive. Start with a caricature of a bad engineer, from first person POV, who doesn't want even try AI, with various reasons, but not disclosing real LLM problems. Then switch to a normal engineer, who admits above was an act, but again shows his colleagues statements about AI, like real ones, which would show how bad and lazy they are, how they don't adopt to new era, real examples, but again not going into real problems like brain rot etc. Make an inpression of a leading edge engineer who tries to save his colleagues, kind of agree with them about AI issues, but in the end show it's their attitude and not AI is the problem.
Here's the list of titles is proposed:
* The Engineer Who Refused to Look Up
* When Experience Becomes a Blindfold
* A Gentle Note to Engineers Who’ve Already Made Up Their Minds
* On Confident Opinions Formed a Little Too Early
* The Curious Case of Engineers Who Are Certain They’re Right
The rest of the article is "curiously" familiar.
Meanwhile I'm getting a 5000 lines PR with code that's all clearly AI generated. It's full of bloat; Unused http endpoints, lots of small utility functions that could have been inlined (but now come with unit tests!), missing translations, only somewhat correct design... The quality wasn't perfect before, now it has taken a noticeable dip. And new code is being added faster than ever. There is no way to keep up. I fe…
In my line of work, I keep seeing it generate sloppy state machines with unreachable or superfluous states, bad floating-point arithmetic, and especially trying to do everything in the innermost loop of a nested iteration.
It also seems to love hallucinating Qt features that should exist but don’t, which I find mildly amusing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Claude Code costs money. You really want to introduce a critical dependency into your workflow that will simultaneously atrophy your skills and charge you subscription fees?
It's also proprietary software running on someone else's machine. All other arguments for or against aside, I am surprised that so many people are okay with this. Not in a one-time use sense, necessarily, but to have long-term plans that this is what programming will be from here on out.
Imagine investing tons of efforts and money into a startup, just to get a clone a week after launch, or worse - before your launch.
> The engineers refusing to try aren’t protecting themselves; quite the opposite, they’re falling behind. The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t. For me, however, there is one issue: how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities? I use AI sparingly because, to be honest, every time I use AI, I feel like I'm getting a little dumber. I fear that excess…
> how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities? Couldn't the same statement, to some extent, be applied to using a sorting lib instead of writing your own sorting algorithm? Or how about using a language like python instead of manually handling memory allocation and garbage collection in C? > What I want above all is AI that helps me become better at my job and continue to build skills and knowledge So…
I think the problem the OP is trying to get at is that if we only program at the level of libs we lose the ability to build fundementally cooler/better things. Not everyone does that of course but AI is not generating fundementally new code its copy pasting. Copy Pasting has its limits especially for people in the long term. Copy paste coders don't build game engines. They don't write operating systems. These are esototeric to some people as how many people actually write those things! But there is a craftsmanship lost in converting more people to Copy Paste all be it with inteligence.
I personally lean on the side that this type of abstraction over thinking is problematic long term. There is a lot damage being done on people not necessiarly in Coding but in Reading/Writing especially in (9-12 grade + college). When we ask people to write essays and read things, AI totally short circuits the process but the truth is no one gets any value in the finished product of an essay about "Why columbus coming to the new world cause X,Y or Z". The value is from the process of thinking that used to be required to generate that essay. This is similar to the OPs worry. You can say well we can do both and think about it as we review AI outputs. But human's are lazy. We don't mull over the calculator thinking about how some value is computed something we take it and run. I think there is lot more value/thinking in the application of the calculated results so calculator didn't destroy mathematical thinking but the same is not necessiarly true in how AI is being applied. The fact of your observation of inn junior dev's output proves support to my view. We are short circuiting the thinking. If those juniors can learn the patterns than there is no issue but it's not guarenteed. I think the uncertainity is the the OPs worry but maybe restated in a better way.
Love to hear your thoughts!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there’s evidence of productivity improvements through AI use, please provide more information. From what I’ve seen, the actual data shows that AI use slows developers down.
The sheer number of projects I've completed that I truly would never have been able to even make a dent in is evidence enough for me. I don't think research will convince you. You need to either watch someone do it, or experiment with it yourself. Get your hands dirty on an audacious project with Claude code.
Many of the people I've encountered who are most staunchly anti-AI are hobbyists. They enjoy programming in their spare time and they got into software as a career because of that. If AI can now adequately perform the enjoyable part of the job in 90% of cases, then what's left for them?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we have a real inflection point now. I try it a bit every year and was always underwhelmed. Halfway through this year was the first time it really impressed me. I now use Claude Code.
But Claude Code costs money. You really want to introduce a critical dependency into your workflow that will simultaneously atrophy your skills and charge you subscription fees?
- google maps
- power tools
- complex js frameworks
- ORMs
- the electrical grid (outages are a thing)
- and so on…
This isn’t a new problem unique to LLMs.
Practice using the tool intelligently and responsibly, and also work to maintain your ability to function without when needed.