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My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

matthewrocklin.com

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Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#41

Post by headcanon »

emseetech wrote: post #15
CharlesW wrote: post #5

I get vibe-coders not having a good experience once the honeymoon is over. But I'm fascinated that a professional software developer could have such a different experience than I do. • LLMs generate junk • LLMs generate a lot of junk

My question is why use AI to output javascript or python? Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal? If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction. Which means its incapabilities in…

One thing I have been doing is breaking out of my long-held default mode of spinning up a react/nextjs project whenever I need frontend, and generating barebones HTML/CSS/JS for basic web apps. A lot of the reason we went with the former was the easy access to packages and easy-to-understand state management, but now that a lot of the functionality packages used to provide can be just as easily generated, I can get a lot more functionality while keeping dependencies minimal.

I haven't tried C or ASM yet, but it has been working very well with a C++ project I've been working on, and I'm sure it would do reasonably well with bare-bones C as well.

I'd be willing to bet it would struggle more with a lower-level language initially, but give it a solid set of guardrails with a testing/eval infrastructure and it'll get its way to what you want.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#42

Post by somebehemoth »

somekyle2 wrote: post #8

I suspect that lots of developers who are sour on relying on AI significantly _would_ agree with most of this, but see the result of that logic leading to (as the article notes) "the skill of writing and reading code is obsolete, and it's our job to make software engineering increasingly entirely automated" and really don't like that outcome so they try to find a way to reject it. "The skillset you've spend decades d…

You are essentially making a character attack on anyone who disagrees with this article. You dismiss outright reasonable objections you have not heard and instead you presume fear and loathing are the only possible motivations to disagree.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#43

Post by fridder »

CharlesW wrote: post #7
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

> I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. Some people find software architecture and systems thinking more fun than coding. Some people find conducting more fun than playing an instrument. It's not too mysterious.

That is accurate for me. I have never enjoyed coding puzzles or advent of code. My version of that is diving into systems and software when it breaks. That is fun...as long as my job or income is not on the line

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#44

Post by rajangdavis »

The more I use AI, the more I think about the book Fooled By Randomness.

AI can take you down a rabbit hole that makes you feel like you are being productive but the generated code can be a dead end because of how you framed the problem to the AI.

Engineers need enough discipline to understand the problems they are trying to solve before delegating a solution to a stochastic text generator.

I don’t always like using AI but have found it helpful in specific use cases such as speeding up CI test pipelines and writing spec; however, someone smarter than me/more familiar with the problem space may have better strategies that I cannot of think of, and I have been fooled by randomness.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#45

Post by aspenmartin »

deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

I understand this sentiment but, it is a lot of fun for me. Because I want to make a real thing to do something, and I didn't get into programming for the love of it, I got into it as a means to an end.

It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's the fun part"

You are doing different things and exercising different skillsets when you use agents. People enjoy different aspects of programming, of building. My job is easier, I'm not sad about that I am very grateful.

Do you resent folks like us that do find it fun? Do you consider us "lesser" because we use coding agents? ("the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning.") <- I don't really care if you consider this "true" painting or not, I wanted a painting and now I have a painting. Call me whatever you want!

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#46

Post by ToucanLoucan »

kleinsch wrote: post #16
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

AI lets you pick the parts you want to focus on and streamline the parts you don't. I get zero joy out of wrestling build tools or figuring out deploy scripts to get what I've built out onto a server. In the past side projects would stall out because the few hours per week I had would get consumed by all of the side stuff. Now I take care of that using AI and focus on the parts I want to write.

Also just.. boring code. Like I'm probably more anti-AI than most, but even I'll acknowledge it's nice to just be like... "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" and just have it work. Or how to load strings from exotic character encodings. Or dozens of other bitchy little issues that drag software dev speed down, don't help me "grow" as a developer, and/or are not interesting to solve, full stop.

I love this job but I can absolutely get people saying that AI helps them not "fight" the computer.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#47

Post by harles »

awfulneutral wrote: post #30
harles wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like. I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.

It feels like this to me too, whenever I give it a try. It's like a button you can push to spend 20 minutes and have a 50/50 chance of either solving the problem with effortless magic, or painfully wasting your time and learning nothing. But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow.

> But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow.

I feel this exactly. I’ve been one of the biggest champions of the tech in my org in spite of the frequent pain I feel from it.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#48

Post by Jonovono »

deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

It’s more like saying you love painting, but you’re glad you no longer have to hike into the wilderness, crush minerals, boil oils, and invent pigments from scratch before you can put brush to canvas.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#49

Post by rileymichael »

sodapopcan wrote: post #12
deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

Seems some people I know who really like AI aren't particularly good with their editors. Lots of AI zealots use the "learn your tools" when they are very slow with their editors. I'm sure that's not true across the board, but the sentiment that it's not worth it to get really advanced with your editor has been pretty prevalent for a very long time. I don't care if you use AI but leave me alone. I'm plenty fast withou…

yep.. learning vim or all of the keybinds/tools at ones disposal in $jetbrains_editor would _actually_ make some peers 2x faster but alas..

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#50

Post by AndrewKemendo »

deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

I have zero desire to go hunt down and create a wrapper to avoid some kernel bug because what I want to do can’t be implemented because of an edge case of some CPU-package incompatibility.

I have found in my software writing experience that the majority of what I want to write is boiler plate with small modifications but most of the problems are insanely hard to diagnose edge cases and I have absolutely no desire nor is it a good use of time in my opinion to deal with structural issues in things that I do not control.

The vast majority of code you do not control because you aren’t the owner of the framework or library your language or whatever and so the Bass majority of software engineering is coming up with solutions to foundational problems of the tools you’re using

The idea that this is the only true type of software engineering is absurd

True software engineering is systems, control and integration engineering.

What I find absolutely annoying is that there’s this rejection of the highest level Hofstetter level of software architecture and engineering

This is basically sneered at over the idea of “I’m gonna go and try to figure out some memory management module because AMD didn’t invest in additional SOC for the problems that I have because they’re optimized for some Business goals.”

It’s frankly junior level thinking

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