What I don't think people are talking enough about yet, is that AI doesn't invent new ways of doing things -- it just predicts the next word based on the materials it was trained on. That means that if a company lets all its coding be done by AI -- that company will be permanently stuck in, say, 2026 -- while other companies will be continuously improving.
What AI coding costs you
41–50 of 206 posts
Re: What AI coding costs you
#42I enjoyed the article, though I do have to pick nits with: > Software used to be deterministic Ah, someone fortunate enough to have never coded a heisenbug or trip over UB of various causes. I've written plenty of well structured, well thought out mostly-deterministic software, then spent hours or days figuring what oversight summoned the gremlins. (There is one low priority bug I've occasionally returned to over the…
all code is deterministic for a given input. If you don't understand the behavior, it's because you don't understand the complete set of inputs into the system.
Assuming you're not tripping over some hardware defect, it sounds like you're using a gcc hack that llvm doesn't support
for a display update, sounds like memory ordering
Re: What AI coding costs you
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even before AI, I’ve witnessed at Google plenty of L6 and L7 software engineers atrophy. They stop writing code, start reviewing code, until they find that their code reviews catch fewer issues than a junior engineer’s reviews. They have become accustomed to thinking only at a high-level, and when met with low-level details they can’t tell good from bad any more. Their coding skills, both reading and writing, have at…
Do they also stop providing value to Google as a result? I don’t get paid to write code, and you probably don’t either.
You are not paid to only write code.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#44The hell with with whatever speed boost I might get. I still write all my code by hand every day, and own what it does. I know it. And I don't have to worry about atrophy. Could've outsourced a long time ago to humans, if I wanted to deal with reading code most of the time instead of writing it.
Do you have management pressure to use these tools? I don’t have any data but me and virtually every software engineer I talk to regularly is feeling or has felt pressure to use these tools.
[deleted]
Re: What AI coding costs you
#45I started my coding apprenticeship back in early 80s with a senior programmer who taught me to code in LSI-11 processor codes. I memorized the whole table of octal processor opcodes and learned how to compose them with data to write programs on PDP-11. I was able to understand what each exact 16-bit word in my program is doing. It was a great skill. But then the same guy taught me FORTRAN 83, and I suddenly understood that writing in opcodes is not exciting anymore, because you can be 10x more productive and suffer less. Now, many years and programming languages later, with my coding skills in LSI-11 opcodes totaly athrophied, I do not regret about loosing that skill at all.
I see no reason to regret that our skills in coding C++/Java/* will decline or athrophy at some point in time. This will mean that we just don't need them anymore.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#46This expresses so well the concerns I've had as I've increasingly leaned into using Copilot at work.
The mismatch in time horizons between employers and developers will be so vexing.
At any given time, the profit-maximizing strategy for each employer is to have engineers ship features as quickly as possible. For each employee, it is rational to retain and strengthen skills by avoiding some amount of cognitive offloading.
Most insidiously, the temptation of cognitive offloading for the employee aligns with the profit-maximizing strategy of the employer.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#47What I don't think people are talking enough about yet, is that AI doesn't invent new ways of doing things -- it just predicts the next word based on the materials it was trained on. That means that if a company lets all its coding be done by AI -- that company will be permanently stuck in, say, 2026 -- while other companies will be continuously improving.
I don't think it is that simple. Innovation can be found on several levels, from the lowest next-token level up to the higher level of new ways of combining things. Surely LLMs can produce code that on the whole does something completely new, even if on a syntactical level it has all been seen before?
We only have a couple dozen letters, still it is possible to write new poetry.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#48Shocking that devs are forgetting that writing and testing code gives us a conceptual map of what the code does...
Almost like someone never ever learned what the core of code development is....
This is why I use zettelkatsen as my own coding AI....long term results are far better than using AI to pretend to code.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#49Hi HN, I've been using Claude Code heavily for the last year. Recently I've noticed a shift in sentiment among peers, here on HN, and over on /r/ExperiencedDevs. I wrote down some thoughts on the hidden costs of using AI too much that are not obvious, yet there's no concrete data yet. I tried to pull together data from a few different places to articulate something I think a lot of us are experiencing right now. I'd…
I’d encourage you to read this post: https://factory.strongdm.ai
It hit the front page here a few weeks ago, but I don’t think most people took it seriously and got hung up on the $1000/day in tokens part.
I am convinced that approach is the future of nearly all software development. It’s basically about how if you’re willing to spend enough tokens, these current models can already complete any software task. With the right framework in place, you don’t need to think about the code at all, only the results.
I really don’t like that the industry is heading this way, but the more I consider that approach, the more I’m convinced it is inevitable.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#50One of the most annoying things is senior leadership thinking that these tools give them the ability to just go do things, then the actual engineers are stuck reviewing the massive amount of slop.
Output from AGIs used by experienced engineers tends to be vastly different quality than output from these leaders who are too disconnected from the slaughtering.