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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

#301

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #98
yoz-y wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that the real dichotomy here. You can either produce 2-5x good maintainable code, or 10-50x more dogshit code that works 80-90% of the time, and that will be a maintenance nightmare. The management has decided that the latter is preferable for short term gains.

It's not dogshit if you're steering. That's what so many of you are not getting. Look at the pretty pictures AI generates. That's where we are with code now. Except you have ComfyUI instead of ChatGPT. You can work with precision. I'm a 500k TC senior SWE. I write six nines, active-active, billion dollar a day systems. I'm no stranger to writing thirty page design documents. These systems can work in my domain just f…

[deleted]

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#302

Post by fzeroracer »

redox99 wrote: post #237
Verdex wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay, but where's the product? You described the product, but didn't share it.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#303

Post by agentultra »

kcexn wrote: post #300
agentultra wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe. I'm not sure its that different though? If one person can do the work of two because of power tools, then why keep both? Same with AI. How people feel about it doesn't seem relevant. Maybe the right example is the role of tractors in agriculture. Prior to tractors you had lots of people do the work, or maybe animals. But tractors and engines eliminate a whole class of labor. You could still till a field by han…

First, creating power tools didn’t cause mass layoffs of carpenters and construction workers. There continued to be a demand for skilled workers.

Second, power tools work with the user’s intent. The user does the planning, the measuring, the cutting and all the activities of building. They might choose to use a dovetail saw instead of fasteners to make a joint.

Third, programming languages are specifications given to a compiler to generate more code. A single programmer can scale to many more customers than a labourer using tools.

The classification of centaur vs reverse-centaur tools came to me by way of Corey Doctorow.

There might be ways to use the technology that doesn’t make us into reverse centaurs but we haven’t discovered that yet. What we have in its current form isn’t a tool.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#304

Post by pdimitar »

krackers wrote: post #299
pdimitar wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am with you and fully agree with your "it does not have to be an all or nothing" stance. A remark on one part of your comment: > What are you adding to the mix here? Your prompting skills? The answer to that is an unironic and dead-serious "yes!". My colleagues use Claude Opus and it does an okay job but misses important things occasionally. I've had one 18-hour session with it and fixed 3 serious but subtle and di…

> unless the LLM companies manage to make another big leap. Why is it a big leap? If the behavior you want can already be elicited by models just with the right level prompting, it's something that can be trained toward. As a simple mental model you could for instance imagine training a verifier-type model of Claude that given a problem spits out a prompt detailing "its success criteria, never to delete tests, never…

> If the behavior you want can already be elicited by models just with the right level prompting

As mentioned upthread, it's not an all-or-nothing. "Just the right prompting" did get me farther than a few other people but I am very sure it's only a temporary advantage as you yourself alluded to (in a rather emotionally loaded way for reasons unknown).

LLMs can't do everything; they need a good feedback loop where they can ascertain if what they did works. There is a LOT of work out there that is not that (f.ex. game development, firmware / embedded work).

The LLM companies are already putting better feedback loops and agentic harnesses; even the upgrade from Opus 4.5 to 4.6 clearly demonstrated that to me. They don't want their GPUs to burn because people can't be bothered to think of an obvious edge case so they'll make the models smarter to compensate for deficiencies in the human operators.

> Do you really think you will hold an advantage over them in your ability to phrase things?

Regardless of your seeming snark the answer is yes, I do. But as said above, that's not going to last long. Who cares though, I make money in the meantime.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#305

Post by nicolas_17 »

chasd00 wrote: post #56
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 _does_ feel good, I know what you mean. I don’t understand why exactly but there’s def an emotion associated with vibe coding. It may be related to the feeling you get when you get some code working and finish a requirement or solve a problem. Maybe vibe coding gives you a shortcut to that endorphin. I think it’s going to be particularly important to manage that feeling and balance with reality. You know, I wonder…

It's just like gambling addiction.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#306

Post by aunty_helen »

lokar wrote: post #172
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…

I worry that means the bad code / schema / design never gets improved. I've spent a lot of my career cleaning up stuff like that, I guess with AI we just stop caring?

Never gets prematurely optimised.

If it’s causing issues you can just ask the ai to improve that part. Shit, it will often even identify problematic areas.

And if migrating from a complete dumpster fire to a cleaner working system sounds hard, I’ve got news. AI can do that for you too! Just get it to write the migration files.

This is what it means to be a developer from today onwards…

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#307

Post by pickleRick243 »

A lot of this discussion is just sort of moot because the cold hard calculus of economics will dictate the future of AI coding. If it turns out it's just a cognitive burden that makes programmers worse, the bubble will pop and eventually the companies that move away from the technology will come out on top. If it turns out to make software engineering much more efficient, it will become the de factor standard and you will become obsolete as a professional engineer (at least at the vast majority of employers) regardless of how you feel about it. How you wish to code in your free time is up to you and one that doesn't really warrant an argument one way or the other since there is no wrong answer.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#308

Post by Ygg2 »

coldtea wrote: post #291
Ygg2 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It absolutely is. It isn't. Coding is to software engineering, what calculation is to math. A necessary but insufficient condition. > And then soon the boss demands more output, like the guys who left it all to Claude and even run 5x in parallel give. You can get 100x output for 1/100x the price, if you replace the monthly Claude subscription with a Markov chain. Think of the efficiency gains. Sure, it will be garb…

> It isn't. Coding is to software engineering, what calculation is to math. A necessary but insufficient condition. It is that, but to Computer Science, its lofty academic cousin. To Software Engineering coding is an essential part.

Ok, fine, if you gonna be nitpicky, it's a calculation to an electrical engineer.

> To Software Engineering coding is an essential part.

Not really. You can be a Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer and do very little coding, but lots of code review and testing.

The point is, if you're just banging out code, then you're a software developer. If you use the engineering design process (research, requirements, design document, feasibility, conceptual design, prototype, detailed design) to solve problems using software, then you're a software engineer.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#309

Post by lazyfolder »

krupan wrote: post #113

The most pertinent thought in this is where the author asks, "LLMs can generate decent-ish and correct-ish looking code while I have more time to do what? doomscroll?" LLMs are not good enough for you to set and forget. You have to stay nearby babysitting it, keeping half an eye on it. That's what's so disheartening to many of us. In my career I have mentored junior engineers and seen them rapidly learn new things an…

I had a colleague liken an LLM to an intern and I didn't agree with that because with a human intern you are invested in their success and there's a joy in watching them grow (when they are willing to). LLMs can't grow.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#310

Post by lazyfolder »

spicyusername wrote: post #174
krupan wrote: post #113

The most pertinent thought in this is where the author asks, "LLMs can generate decent-ish and correct-ish looking code while I have more time to do what? doomscroll?" LLMs are not good enough for you to set and forget. You have to stay nearby babysitting it, keeping half an eye on it. That's what's so disheartening to many of us. In my career I have mentored junior engineers and seen them rapidly learn new things an…

while I have more time to do what? For work, I regularly have 2-4 agents going simultaneously, churning on 1-3 features, bug fixes, doc updates. I pop between them in the "down time", or am reviewing their output, or am preparing the requirements for the next thing, or am reviewing my coworkers MRs. Plenty to do that isn't doom scrolling.

Out of curiousity, how do you manage the constant context switching? It's hard for me to manage the context of one coding session, let along 2-4 sessions.
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