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Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

bicameral-ai.com

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Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#81

Post by KptMarchewa »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #80
micw wrote: post #14

For me, AI is an enabler for things you can't do otherwise (or that would take many weeks of learning). But you still need to know how to do things properly in general, otherwise the results are bad. E.g. I'm a software architect and developer for many years. So I know already how to build software but I'm not familiar with every language or framework. AI enabled me to write other kind of software I never learned or…

> Or I fixed a bug in a linux scanner driver. None of these I could have done properly (within an acceptable time frame) without AI. But also none of there I could have done properly without my knowledge and experience, even with AI There are some things here that folks making statements like yours often omit and it makes me very sus about your (over)confidence. Mostly these statements talk in a business short-term r…

Why would you ever, outside flight and medical software, care about being 100% sure that the change did not introduce any bugs?

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#82

Post by jacquesm »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #80
micw wrote: post #14

For me, AI is an enabler for things you can't do otherwise (or that would take many weeks of learning). But you still need to know how to do things properly in general, otherwise the results are bad. E.g. I'm a software architect and developer for many years. So I know already how to build software but I'm not familiar with every language or framework. AI enabled me to write other kind of software I never learned or…

> Or I fixed a bug in a linux scanner driver. None of these I could have done properly (within an acceptable time frame) without AI. But also none of there I could have done properly without my knowledge and experience, even with AI There are some things here that folks making statements like yours often omit and it makes me very sus about your (over)confidence. Mostly these statements talk in a business short-term r…

It's incredible that within two minutes after posting this comment is already grayed out whereas it makes a number of excellent points.

I've been playing with various AI tools and homebrew setups for a long time now and while I see the occasional advantage it isn't nearly as much of a revolution as I've been led to believe by a number of the ardent AI proponents here.

This is starting to get into 'true believer' territory: you get these two camps 'for and against' whereas the best way forward is to insist on data rather than anecdotes.

AI has served me well, no doubt about that. But it certainly isn't a passe-partout and the number of times it has caused gross waste of time because it insisted on chasing some rabbit simply because it was familiar with the rabbit adds up to a considerable loss in productivity.

The scientific principle is a very powerful tool in such situations and anybody insisting on it should be applauded. It separates fact from fiction and allows us to make impartial and non-emotional evaluations of both theories and technologies.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#83

Post by jacquesm »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #81
netdevphoenix wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or I fixed a bug in a linux scanner driver. None of these I could have done properly (within an acceptable time frame) without AI. But also none of there I could have done properly without my knowledge and experience, even with AI There are some things here that folks making statements like yours often omit and it makes me very sus about your (over)confidence. Mostly these statements talk in a business short-term r…

Why would you ever, outside flight and medical software, care about being 100% sure that the change did not introduce any bugs?

Because bugs are bad. Fixing one bug but accidentally introducing three more is such a pattern it should have a name.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#84

Post by bandrami »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #81
netdevphoenix wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or I fixed a bug in a linux scanner driver. None of these I could have done properly (within an acceptable time frame) without AI. But also none of there I could have done properly without my knowledge and experience, even with AI There are some things here that folks making statements like yours often omit and it makes me very sus about your (over)confidence. Mostly these statements talk in a business short-term r…

Why would you ever, outside flight and medical software, care about being 100% sure that the change did not introduce any bugs?

Because why would you make something broken when you could make something not broken?

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#85

Post by bandrami »

micw wrote: post #14

For me, AI is an enabler for things you can't do otherwise (or that would take many weeks of learning). But you still need to know how to do things properly in general, otherwise the results are bad. E.g. I'm a software architect and developer for many years. So I know already how to build software but I'm not familiar with every language or framework. AI enabled me to write other kind of software I never learned or…

Huh. I'm extremely skeptical of AI in areas where I don't have expertise, because in areas where I do have expertise I see how much it gets wrong. So it's fine for me to use it in those areas because I can catch the errors, but I can't catch errors in fields I don't have any domain expertise in.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#86

Post by locknitpicker »

coffeefirst wrote: post #38
anonzzzies wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a bug is present but there is no one who encounters it, is it negative business value?

That’s not how this goes. Because the entire codebase is crap, each user encounters a different bug. So now all your customers are mad, but they’re all mad for different reasons, and support is powerless to do anything about it. The problems pile up but they’re can’t be solved without a competent rewrite. This is a bad place to be. And at some level of sloppiness you can get load bearing bugs, where there’s an unknow…

> That’s not how this goes.

Once you gain some professional experience working with software development, you'll understand that that's exactly how it goes.

I think you are failing to understand the "soft" in "software". Changing software is trivial. All software has bugs, but the only ones being worked on are those which are a) deemed worthy of being worked on, b) have customer impact.

> So now all your customers are mad, but they’re all mad for different reasons, and support is powerless to do anything about it.

That's not how it works. You are somehow assuming software isn't maintained. What do you think software developers do for a living?

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#87

Post by embedding-shape »

physicsguy wrote: post #27
mirsadm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Claude Code a lot but one thing that really made me concerned was when I asked it about some ideas I have had which I am very familiar with. It's response was to constantly steer me away from what I wanted to do towards something else which was fine but a mediocre way to do things. It made me question how many times I've let it go off and do stuff without checking it thoroughly.

I've had quite a bit of the "tell it to do something in a certain way", it does that at first, then a few messages of corrections and pointers, it forgets that constraint.

> it does that at first, then a few messages of corrections and pointers, it forgets that constraint.

Yup, most models suffer from this. Everyone is raving about million tokens context, but none of the models can actually get past 20% of that and still give as high quality responses as the very first message.

My whole workflow right now is basically composing prompts out of the agent, let them run with it and if something is wrong, restart the conversation from 0 with a rewritten prompt. None of that "No, what I meant was ..." but instead rewrite it so the agent essentially solves it without having to do back and forth, just because of this issue that you mention.

Seems to happen in Codex, Claude Code, Qwen Coder and Gemini CLI as far as I've tested.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#88

Post by svara »

jacquesm wrote: post #82
netdevphoenix wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or I fixed a bug in a linux scanner driver. None of these I could have done properly (within an acceptable time frame) without AI. But also none of there I could have done properly without my knowledge and experience, even with AI There are some things here that folks making statements like yours often omit and it makes me very sus about your (over)confidence. Mostly these statements talk in a business short-term r…

It's incredible that within two minutes after posting this comment is already grayed out whereas it makes a number of excellent points. I've been playing with various AI tools and homebrew setups for a long time now and while I see the occasional advantage it isn't nearly as much of a revolution as I've been led to believe by a number of the ardent AI proponents here. This is starting to get into 'true believer' terr…

> (...) you get these two camps 'for and against' whereas the best way forward is to insist on data rather than anecdotes.

I think that's an issue with online discussions. It barely happens to me in the real world, but it's huge on HN.

I'm overall very positive about AI, but I also try to be measured and balanced and learn how to use it properly. Yet here on HN, I always get the feeling people responding to me have decided I am a "true believer" and respond to the true believer persona in their head.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#89

Post by KptMarchewa »

jacquesm wrote: post #83
KptMarchewa wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you ever, outside flight and medical software, care about being 100% sure that the change did not introduce any bugs?

Because bugs are bad. Fixing one bug but accidentally introducing three more is such a pattern it should have a name.

They are. And we have processes to minimize them - tests, code review, staging/preprod envs - but they are nowhere close to being 100% sure that code is bug free - that's just way too high bar for both AI and purely human workflows outside of few pretty niche fields.

Re: Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

#90

Post by KptMarchewa »

bandrami wrote: post #84
KptMarchewa wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you ever, outside flight and medical software, care about being 100% sure that the change did not introduce any bugs?

Because why would you make something broken when you could make something not broken?

Because it's way too high bar to be 100% sure outside of few niche fields.
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