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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

#231

Post by AstroBen »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #115
acedTrex wrote: post #6

I will do what i know gives me the best possible and fastest outcome over the long term, 5-10 year period. And that remains largely neovim and by hand. The process of typing code gives me a deeper understanding of the project that lets me deliver future features FASTER. I'm fundamentally convinced that my investment into deep long term grokking of a project will allow me to surpass primarily LLM projects over the lon…

Idk what the median lifespan of a piece of code / project / employee tenure is but probably way less than 10 years, which makes that "long term investment" pretty pointless in most cases.

Unsuccessful projects: way less than 10 years

Successful projects: quite often much longer than 10 years

Code quality doesn't matter until lots of people start using what you wrote and you need to maintain/extend/change it

God it's a depressing thought that whatever work you do is just a throwaway no-one will use. That shouldn't be your end goal

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#232

Post by chasd00 »

krupan wrote: post #132
chasd00 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, you’re still in control of your code. It’s not an xor thing, the agent does its thing but the code is still there and yours. You can still adjust, fix, enhance etc. you’re still in control. The agent is there to help as much or as little as you want.

Control over code requires understanding it. That's what letting an LLM wrote everything takes away from you

I see what you mean but I haven’t had an LLM produce code that I didn’t understand or couldn’t follow. Also, if it does it’s pretty easy to ask it to explain it to you. I’ve asked for explanations for ridiculously long lists of tailwind css classes but that’s just a pet peeve really, I mean, I understand what they’re doing.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#233

Post by thwarted »

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…

There's DeWALT, Craftsman, Stanley, etc carpentry/mechanic power tool brands who make a wide variety of all manner of tools and tooling; the equivalents in computers (at least UNIXy) are coreutils (fileutils, shellutils, and textutils), netpbm, sed, awk, the contents of /usr/bin, and all their alternative, updated brands like fd, the silver searcher, and ripgrep are, or the progression of increased sharpening in revision control tools from rcs, sccs, svn, to mercurial and git; or telnet-ssh, rcp-rsync, netcat-socat. Even perl and python qualify as multi-tool versions of separate power tools. I'd even include language compilers and interpreters in general as extremely sharp and powerful power multi-tools, the machine shop that lets you create more power tools. When you use these, you're working with your hands.

GenAI is none of that, it's not a power tool, even though it can use power tools or generate output like the above power tools do. GenAI is hiring someone else to build a bird house or a spice rack, and then saying you had a hand in the results. It's asking the replicator for "tea, earl grey, hot". It's like how we elevate CEOs just because they're the face of the company, as if they actually did the work and were solely responsible for the output. There's skill in organization and direction, not all CEOs get undeserved recognition, but it's the rare CEO who's getting their hands dirty creating something or some process, power tools or not. GenAI lets you, everyone, be the CEO.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#234

Post by Verdex »

redox99 wrote: post #229
wtetzner wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen any evidence yet that using AI is improving developer performance, just a bunch of people who "feel" like it does.

I've built a SaaS (with paying customers) in a month that would have taken me easily 6 months to build with this level of quality and features. AI wrote I'd say 99.9% of code. Without AI I wouldn't even have done this because it would have been too large of a task. In addition, for my old product which is 5+ years old, AI now writes 95%+ of code for me. Now the programming itself takes a small percentage of my time,…

Cool. What's the product? Like, do you have a link to it or something.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#235

Post by thesz »

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…

  > But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do that professionally for much longer.
Who are "we" and why do "we" "pretend"?

  > Will they ever carve furniture by hand for a business? Probably not.
This is definitely a stretch.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#236

Post by AstroBen »

redox99 wrote: post #229
wtetzner wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen any evidence yet that using AI is improving developer performance, just a bunch of people who "feel" like it does.

I've built a SaaS (with paying customers) in a month that would have taken me easily 6 months to build with this level of quality and features. AI wrote I'd say 99.9% of code. Without AI I wouldn't even have done this because it would have been too large of a task. In addition, for my old product which is 5+ years old, AI now writes 95%+ of code for me. Now the programming itself takes a small percentage of my time,…

No-one serious is claiming 6x productivity improvements for close to equal quality

This is proving GP's point that you're going off feels and/or exaggerating

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#237

Post by redox99 »

Verdex wrote: post #234
redox99 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've built a SaaS (with paying customers) in a month that would have taken me easily 6 months to build with this level of quality and features. AI wrote I'd say 99.9% of code. Without AI I wouldn't even have done this because it would have been too large of a task. In addition, for my old product which is 5+ years old, AI now writes 95%+ of code for me. Now the programming itself takes a small percentage of my time,…

Cool. What's the product? Like, do you have a link to it or something.

It's boring glorified CRUD for SMBs of a certain industry focused on compliance and workflows specific to my country. Think your typical inventory, ticketing, CRM + industry specific features.

Boring stuff from a programming standpoint but stuff that helps businesses so they pay for it.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#238

Post by redox99 »

AstroBen wrote: post #236
redox99 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've built a SaaS (with paying customers) in a month that would have taken me easily 6 months to build with this level of quality and features. AI wrote I'd say 99.9% of code. Without AI I wouldn't even have done this because it would have been too large of a task. In addition, for my old product which is 5+ years old, AI now writes 95%+ of code for me. Now the programming itself takes a small percentage of my time,…

No-one serious is claiming 6x productivity improvements for close to equal quality This is proving GP's point that you're going off feels and/or exaggerating

Quality is better both from a user and a code perspective.

From a user perspective I often implement a feature and then just throw it away no worries because I can reimplement it in an hour again based on my findings. No sunken cost. Also I can implement very small details that otherwise I'd have to backlog. This leads to a higher quality product for the user.

From a code standpoint I frequently do large refactors that also would never have been worth it by hand. I have a level of test coverage that would be infeasible for a one man show.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#239

Post by freeopinion »

lokar wrote: post #216
onehair wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder just what goes into someone's mind, when they do not care about who in the future is gonna have to maintain what they've crafted. Nor care about the experience of the user. Nor even feel accountable when they haven't done their due diligence to do things right.

And each time you do this, you make it worse. Now, if anyone ever wants to fix this, they have to fix your code as well.

You could say that. The schema in question was not mine nor in any way within my control. I could start up a business and write an entire app to replace the one in question. Maybe I could even get you to donate some money to fund that endeavor. Or I could spend an hour one time to code an external work around so I don't have to spend two hours a cycle fighting with that stupid app.

This is how ridiculous workflows evolve, but it really isn't AI's fault.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#240

Post by swid »

igravious wrote: post #211
blks wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s correct to claim that AI generated code is just next level of abstraction. All previously mentioned levels produce deterministic results. Same input, same output. AI-generation is not deterministic. It’s not even predictable. And example of big software companies clearly show what mass adoption of AI tools will look like in terms of software quality. I dread if using AI will ever be an expectation,…

People on here keep trotting out this "AI-generation is not deterministic." (more properly speaking, non-deterministic) argument on here … And my retort to you (and them) is, "Oh yeah, and so?" What about me asking Claude Code to generate a factorial function in C or Python or Rust or insert-your-language-of-choice-here is non-deterministic ? If you're referring to the fact that for a given input LLMs (or whatever) b…

I personally have jested many times I picked my career because the logical soundness of programming is comforting to me. A one is always a one; you don’t measure it and find it off by some error; you can’t measure it a second time and get a different value.

I’ve also said code is prose for me.

I am not some autistic programmer either, even if these statements out of context make me sound like one.

The non-determinism has nothing to do with temperature; it has everything to do with that fact that even at temp equal to zero, a single meaningless change can produce a different result. It has to do with there being no way to predict what will happen when you run the model on your prompt.

Coding with LLMs is not the same job. How could it be the same to write a mathematical proof compared to asking an LLM to generate that proof for you? These are different tasks that use different parts of the brain.

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