This is exactly how I feel about engineers who dismiss Vim.
Engineers who dismiss AI
211–220 of 256 posts
Re: Engineers who dismiss AI
#212"AI coding is so much better now that any skepticism from 6 months ago is invalid" has been the refrain for the last 3 years. After the first few cycles of checking it out and realizing that it's still not meeting your quality bar, it's pretty reasonable to dismiss the AI hype crowd.
It's gotten ok now. Just spent a day with Claude for the first time in a while. Demanded strict TDD and implemented one test at a time. Might have been faster, hard to say for sure. Result was good.
Re: Engineers who dismiss AI
#213The catch-22 I run into with AI coding help is always: it helps the most with problems I know how to solve. I feel like most engineers run into problems where we can't fully articulate the problem we're having (otherwise we would be able to fix it). In which case AI can be helpful, but more in a google way.
Re: Engineers who dismiss AI
#214Some of us actually enjoy writing code, and wish to preserve the skill, so we have no motivation to offload the task to an LLM. Do LLM coding evangelists also badger illustrators, asking why they don't just embrace machine learning image generation? Do they tell people they shouldn't have human friends because chatbots exist? Do they insist that musicians slough off their creativity like a molting snake, and just let…
"People say that you should not micro-optimize. But if what you love is micro-optimization... that's what you should do." -Linus
Re: Engineers who dismiss AI
#215That 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…
It was about how I expected a straw man written by somebody who fully bought into the AI coding hype.
Especially the part about somebody completing a project quickly being depicted as "cheating". Absurd.
Re: Engineers who dismiss AI
#216One has to wonder: why even bother writing a post like this? I’m guessing insecurity.
For what it’s worth, I’m fine with “falling behind.” I didn’t want to be a manager when I was at FAANG, and I don’t want to be an AI puppetmaster now. I got into this field because I actually love programming, and I’ll just keep on doing that while the world gets driven mad by their newfound corporate oracle, thanks. Feel free to lap me with your inscrutable 10,000-line PRs and enjoy your technical debt.
Re: Engineers who dismiss AI
#217Let me know when AI can create functions for the secp256k1 library that adds a point in jacobian coordinates to another point in jacobian coordinates, both in variable time and in constant time. i.e. add functions void secp256k1_gej_add_gej(secp256k1_gej *r, const secp256k1_gej *a, const secp256k1_gej *b); and void secp256k1_gej_add_gej_var(secp256k1_gej *r, const secp256k1_gej *a, const secp256k1_gej *b); As with th…
It probably can't do that.
But neither can most humans.
I admit to being surprised at what it actually can do, pretty much all by itself.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/the-ars-technica-ai-codin...
Re: Engineers who dismiss AI
#218> 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…
There is the other issue that AI generated anything has a value close to zero.
So what's my cut of something basically worthless? Doesn't seem lucrative in the long run.
Re: Engineers who dismiss AI
#219> 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…
I know this is reductionist, and I believe that you are likely correct in your concerns, but this type of thing has been happening for thousands of years. Writing itself was controversial!
> They go on to discuss what is good or bad in writing. Socrates tells a brief legend, critically commenting on the gift of writing from the Egyptian god Theuth to King Thamus, who was to disperse Theuth's gifts to the people of Egypt. After Theuth remarks on his discovery of writing as a remedy for the memory, Thamus responds that its true effects are likely to be the opposite; it is a remedy for reminding, not remembering, he says, with the appearance but not the reality of wisdom. Future generations will hear much without being properly taught, and will appear wise but not be so, making them difficult to get along with.
Re: Engineers who dismiss AI
#220This is exactly how I feel about engineers who dismiss Vim.
It's probably not unrealistic that a programmer who learns Vim well could be, say, 2x more productive in Vim than in, say, Nano.
Yet programmers who have used Nano were not (at least not significantly) scoffed at or ridiculed. It was their choice of tool, and they were getting work done.
It seems unclear how much more productive AI coding tools can make a programmer; some people claim 10x, some claim it actually makes you slower. But let us suppose it is on average the same 2x productivity increase as Vim.
Why then was using Vim not heralded from every rooftop the same as using AI?