I'm not buying this argument - use it or lose it isn't even true in physical sense - sure if you stop working out you lose muscles/strength - but once you start back up the rate of progression is like 5x.
What AI coding costs you
71–80 of 206 posts
Re: What AI coding costs you
#72I wish we reach a point were we expect (as a matter of online etiquette) upfront disclaimers on predominantly AI-generated articles, so that we can save a few seconds and directly get our agents to read and summarize them. Even when it's not slop, the verbosity of poorly edited AI-generated content is a micro-agression against readers. The prompter expects readers to read what they couldn't be bothered to properly ed…
> micro-agression against readers
Re: What AI coding costs you
#73The 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.
FWIW, I'm responsible for our engineering team, and I'm the one starting to put some gentle pressure on the developers right now. Velocity used to be one of the bigger issues we had: Features used to be in development over weeks, while customers, product management, and engineers iterated on the feature, until it was finally deemed stable enough and shipped. With AI, we can shorten that cycle considerably, and get stuff out of the door in days or even hours instead. Doing so requires adapting your processes accordingly, give up some control over the details, take good care of tests, and do proper code reviews.
Given all that, I just cannot ignore AI as a development tool. There is no good justification I can give the rest of the company for why we would not incorporate AI tools into our workflows, and this also means I cannot leave it up to individual developers on whether they want to use AI or not.
This pains me a lot: On the one hand, it feels irresponsible to the junior developers and their education to let them outsource thinking; on the other hand, we're not a charity fund but a company that needs to make money. Also, many of us (me included) got into this career for the joy of creating. Nobody anticipated this could stop being part of the deal, but here were are.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#74It remains unclear to me why my ability to read and review code (the majority of my job for years now) will atrophy if I continue doing it while writing even less code than I was before. If my ability to write code somehow atrophies because I stop doing it, does that matter if I continue with the architecture and strategy around coding? The act of writing code by hand seems to be on a trajectory of irrelevance, so as…
"so as long as I maintain my ability to reason about code…what’s the issue?" It seems like that is the open question. The article suggests that people don't maintain this ability: "The AI group scored 17% lower on conceptual understanding, debugging, and code reading. The largest gap was in debugging, the exact skill you need to catch what AI gets wrong. One hour of passive AI-assisted work produced measurable skill…
The problem is that that is an incorrect interpretation of the study. The entire task of that study was specifically to learn a brand new asynchronous library that they hadn't had experience with before. As a group on average, those who used AI failed to learn how to use explain and debug that async library as well as those who hadn't used AI on average had, but that doesn't mean they lost pre-existing skills. It's literally in the study title: "skill formation", not skill practice, maintenance, or deterioration.
I think it's also extremely worth pointing out that when you break down the AI using group by how they actually used AI, those who had the AI both provide code and afterwards provide a summary of the concepts and what it did actually scored among the highest. The same for ones who actually use the AI to ask it questions about the code it generated after it generated that code. Which seems to indicate to me that as long as you're having the AI explain and summarize what it did after each badge of edits. And you're also using it to explore and explain existing code bases. You're not going to see this problem.
I'm so extremely tired of people like you who want to engage in this moral panic completely misinterpreting these studies
Re: What AI coding costs you
#75One of the things I have started to realize whilst building apps using AI is that you get a bit indulgent when it comes to features. So in my toy project I wanted all sorts of quality of life bells-and-whistles. If this were a proper enterprise application there would have a been a review and priortization process where the merits would be weighted against the cost. In this case the cost is tokens, so fraction of FTE…
Other comments have mentioned upstream delays in deciding what features to build now that teams can deliver faster - but you bring up another issue around downstream “understanding debt”. How can sales and marketing sell this stuff if they don’t even know what everything does? How does customer service support it? Sure you can just slop-together documentation, blogs, etc but what good are all these extra features if end-users don’t know or just don’t care about them?
Re: What AI coding costs you
#76I 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 understoo…
I think this is a false comparison, and I believe cognitive science will show this to be true over time.
"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."
But the cognitive capacities you developed reasoning about opcodes almost certainly made it easier for you to learn FORTRAN and its successors.
LSI-11 opcodes, FORTRAN 83, C++, the lambda calculus, etc are all formal languages that we can reason about logically. It's also the case that we can implement machines (hardware or virtual) that can in practice produce the results that match our logical deductions. This is generally what people mean when they say these languages are "deterministic".
It seems obvious to me that it is more cognitively demanding to reason about formal languages like these, to prove to oneself that a given change in the code will produces the outcomes you intend, than it is to prompt for changes in the code and review it.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#77I am a student who will be starting my first job this summer. A lot of what is written in the blog is something I have been feeling subconsciously, the joy is being sucked out of programming and idk if I will even have a job in a few years. Most of my seniors from college tell me that they are just prompting in their jobs.
I don’t know how I will be able to build intuition for code I don’t write just “understand”
Re: What AI coding costs you
#78There's another great comment by daxfohl that I saved. The "complacency" at scale worries me [1]
Copied to save you a click:
> I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and go back to its original approach, or mix the two, or whatever. Eventually it was easier just to quit fighting it and let it do things the way it wanted.
> What I've seen is that after the initial dopamine rush of being able to do things that would have taken much longer manually, a few iterations of this kind of interaction has slowly led to a disillusionment of the whole project, as AI keeps pushing it in a direction I didn't want.
> I think this is especially true if you're trying to experiment with new approaches to things. LLMs are, by definition, biased by what was in their training data. You can shock them out of it momentarily, whish is awesome for a few rounds, but over time the gravitational pull of what's already in their latent space becomes inescapable. (I picture it as working like a giant Sierpinski triangle).
> I want to say the end result is very akin to doom scrolling. Doom tabbing? It's like, yeah I could be more creative with just a tad more effort, but the AI is already running and the bar to seeing what the AI will do next is so low, so....
Re: What AI coding costs you
#79I'm not buying this argument - use it or lose it isn't even true in physical sense - sure if you stop working out you lose muscles/strength - but once you start back up the rate of progression is like 5x.
With exercise and cognition alike, the concern is motivational. If you let yourself get out of shape, it can be very difficult to rebuild the habits required to get back into shape. You get drawn into a bad local maximum (e.g. prompting everything, driving everywhere) and find you don't have the energy to get out.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#80Hi 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…
Thanks, I like it! Thanks for taking time putting it together.