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I am happier writing code by hand

abhinavomprakash.com

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Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#191

Post by andyfilms1 »

tux1968 wrote: post #183
andyfilms1 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he's missing the point at all. A band saw is an immutable object with a fixed, deterministic capability--in other words, a tool. An LLM is a slot machine. You can pull keep pulling the lever, but you'll get different results every time. A slot machine is technically a machine that can produce money, but nobody would ever say it's a tool for producing money.

People keep trotting this argument out. But a band saw is not deterministic either, it can snap in the middle of a cut and destroy what you're working on. The point is, we only treat it like it's deterministic, because most of the time it's reliable enough that it just does what we want. AI technology will definitely get to the same level eventually. Clinging on to the fact that it isn't yet at that level today, is j…

I feel like we're both in similar minds of opposite sides, so perhaps you can answer me this: How is a deterministic AI any different from a search engine?

In other words, if you and me always get the same results back for the same prompt (definition of determinism,) isn't that just really, really power hungry Google?

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#192

Post by omnimus »

panarky wrote: post #88
woeirua wrote: post #5

This is no different then carpentry. Yes, all furniture can now be built by machines. Some people still choose to build it by hand. Does that make them less productive? Yes. Will they ever carve furniture by hand for a business? Probably not. Can they still enjoy the act of working with the wood? Yes. If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do…

Some people like to spin their own wool, weave their own cloth, sew their own clothes. A few even make a good living by selling their artisanal creations. Good for them! It's great when people can earn a living doing what they love. But wool spinning and cloth weaving are automated and apparel is mass produced. There will always be some skilled artisans who do it by hand, but the vast majority of decent jobs in texti…

The metaphor doesn't work because all of the things mentioned have to be individually fabricated. But software doesn't. Copies are free. Thats the magic of software, you don't need much of it - you just need to be correct/smarter.

It's pretty surprising to see people on this site (assume mostly programmers) to think of code in terms of quantity. I always thought developers believe in less code the better.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#193

Post by askonomm »

Seems like the author has a case of all or nothing. The real power in agentic programming, to me, is not in extremes, but in that you are still actively present. You don't give it world-size things to do, but byte-sized, and you constantly steer it. It's to be detailed enough to produce quality, and to be aware of everything it produces, but not so detailed that it makes sense to just write the code yourself. It's a delicate balance, but once you've found it, incredibly powerful. Especially mixed with deterministic self-checking tools (like some MCP's).

If you "set and forget", then you are vibe coding, and I do not trust for a second that the output is quality, or that you'd even know how that output fits into the larger system. You effectively delegate away the reason you are being paid onto the AI, so why pay you? What are you adding to the mix here? Your prompting skills?

Agentic programming to me is just a more efficient use of the tools I already used anyway, but it's not doing the thinking for me, it's just doing the _doing_ for me.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#194

Post by adelie »

rf15 wrote: post #9

This is pointing out one factor of vibecoding that is talked about too little: that it feels good, and that this feeling often clouds people's judgment on what is actually achieved (i.e. you lost control of the code and are running more and more frictionless on hopes and dreams)

it feels good because we've turned coding into a gacha machine. you chase the high from when it works, and if it doesn't, you just throw more tokens at the problem.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#195

Post by skzizjj »

freeopinion wrote: post #59

I think it is pretty indisputable that there is a valuable place for AI. I recently had to interact with a very horrible db schema. The best approach I came up with to solve my challenge involved modelling a table with 300 columns. Converting some sql ddl to a Rust struct was simple but tedious work. A prompt with less than 15 words guided an AI to produce the 900+ loc for me. It took a couple seconds to scan it to s…

[dead]

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#196

Post by mooktakim »

kmaitreys wrote: post #184
mooktakim wrote: post #70

Initially I felt like this but now I've changed. Now I realise a lot of grunt work doesn't need to be done by me, i can direct llm to make changes. I can also experiment more as I'm able to build complex features, try it out and delete it without feeling too bad.

The more I read about things like this more I realize that software engineering today's just bloat and grunt work that people want to escape. It's so ironic because computers/computer programs were literally invented to avoid doing grunt work.

I agree. But I do have some concerns. Sometimes the LLM writes code and its a lot of work to go through it. I get lazy and trust LLM too much. I've been doing this for a while so I know how it should write, I go back and try to fix or refactor. But a new dev might direct LLM to write code they might not understand. Like a blackbox. LLM makes a lot of decisions without you realising, decisions which you used to make yourself. Writing code is making thousand decisions.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#197

Post by tux1968 »

andyfilms1 wrote: post #191
tux1968 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep trotting this argument out. But a band saw is not deterministic either, it can snap in the middle of a cut and destroy what you're working on. The point is, we only treat it like it's deterministic, because most of the time it's reliable enough that it just does what we want. AI technology will definitely get to the same level eventually. Clinging on to the fact that it isn't yet at that level today, is j…

I feel like we're both in similar minds of opposite sides, so perhaps you can answer me this: How is a deterministic AI any different from a search engine? In other words, if you and me always get the same results back for the same prompt (definition of determinism,) isn't that just really, really power hungry Google?

I'm not sure pure determinism is actually a desirable goal. I mean, if you ask the best programmer in the world the same question every day, you're likely to eventually get a new answer at some point. But if you ask him, or I ask him, hopefully he gives the same good answer, to us both. In any case, he's not just a power hungry Google, because he can contextualize our question, and understand us when we ask in very obscured ways; maybe without us even understanding what we're actually looking for.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#198

Post by sathish316 »

> “vibe coding has an addictive nature to it, you write some instructions, and code that looks correct is generated. Bam! Dopamine hit! If the code isn’t correct, then it’s just one prompt away from being correct”

The reason Claude code or Cursor feels addictive even if it makes mistakes is better illustrated in this post - https://x.com/cryptocyberia/status/2014380759956471820?s=46

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#199

Post by runarberg »

tux1968 wrote: post #183
andyfilms1 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he's missing the point at all. A band saw is an immutable object with a fixed, deterministic capability--in other words, a tool. An LLM is a slot machine. You can pull keep pulling the lever, but you'll get different results every time. A slot machine is technically a machine that can produce money, but nobody would ever say it's a tool for producing money.

People keep trotting this argument out. But a band saw is not deterministic either, it can snap in the middle of a cut and destroy what you're working on. The point is, we only treat it like it's deterministic, because most of the time it's reliable enough that it just does what we want. AI technology will definitely get to the same level eventually. Clinging on to the fact that it isn't yet at that level today, is j…

So instead of determinism being a binary you consider it a binomial distribution with p extremely close but not strictly equal to 1.

I think this is a distinction without a difference, we all know what we mean when way say deterministic here.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#200

Post by pawelwentpawel »

agentultra wrote: post #81
woeirua wrote: post #5

This is no different then carpentry. Yes, all furniture can now be built by machines. Some people still choose to build it by hand. Does that make them less productive? Yes. Will they ever carve furniture by hand for a business? Probably not. Can they still enjoy the act of working with the wood? Yes. If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do…

I’ve heard this metaphor before and I don’t think it works well. For one, a power tool like a bandsaw is a centaur technology. I, the human, am the top half of the centaur. The tool drives around doing what I tell it to do and helping me to do the task faster (or at all in some cases). A GenAI tool is a reverse-centaur technology. The algorithm does almost all of the work. I’m the bottom half of the centaur helping t…

I think this argument would work if hand-written code would convey some kind of status, like an expensive pair of Japanese selvage jeans. For now though, it doesn't seem to me that people paying for software care if it was written by a human or an AI tool.
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