Live data from Hacker News

What AI coding costs you

tomwojcik.com

131–140 of 206 posts

Re: What AI coding costs you

#131

Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudg…

Well said. I've found that I reach for Copilot most often when working on frontend javascript code. Will the incentive to improve the frontend libraries, browser standards, etc vanish now that LLMs let us avoid some of this pain?

I wonder if they will improve in a specific direction - frameworks and libraries built to be easier for LLMs to use.

This could even happen through accidental evolution - a framework that is easier on an LLMs context window results in more successful projects, which results in more training data, which results in LLMs being even better at it.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#132

The 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.

If programmer speed and efficiency was truly such a significant competitive factor, we wouldn't be packing them like sardines them in noisy and stuffy open floor plan offices.

This. And there would be huge investments in productivity and reducing bureaucracy.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#133
post #73
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

So, you have a duty of care to make a safe workplace, at least in most countries.

Consider what a job with no joy means for the ongoing mental health of your staff, where the main interaction they have all day is with an AI model that the person has to boss around; with little training on norms. Depression, frustration, nonchalance, isolation, and corner cutting are going to be the likely responses.

So at the same time as you introduce new tooling, introduce the quality controls you would expect for someone utterly checked out of the process, and the human resources policies or prevention to avoid your team speed running Godwin's law because they dont deal with people enough to remember social niceties are important.

Examples off of the top of my head of ways to do this are: - Increased socialisation in the design processes. Mandatory fun sucks, a whiteboard party and collaboration will bring some creativity and shared ownership. - Budget for AI minimal or free periods, where the intent is to do a chunk of work "the hard way"; and have people share what they experienced or learnt - Make people test each other's work (manual testing) or collaborate, otherwise you will have a dysfunctional team who reaches for "yell in all caps to make sure the prompt sticks" as the way people talk to each other/deal with conflict.

The way to justify this to management above you is the cost of staff retention - advertise, interview, hire, pay market rates, equip, train, followed 6 months later by securely off boarding, hardware return, exit interview means you get maybe 4 months productivity out of each person, and pay 2 months salary in all of the early job mistakes or late job not caring, or HR debacle. Do you or your next level up want to spend 30% more time doing this process? Or would you rather focus on generating revenue with a team that works well together and are on board for the long term?

The answer most of the time is "we want to make money, not spend it". So do the math on what staff replacement costs are and then argue for building in enough slack to the process that it costs about half of that to maintain it/train the staff/etc.

Your company is now making a "50% efficiency gain" in the HR funnel, year over year, all by simply... not turning the dial up to 10 on forced AI usage.

Framed like that, sounds a lot better doesn't it?

Re: What AI coding costs you

#134
post #66

Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudg…

That’s why I laugh when people are like “oh, AI writes all the tests, it’s so much easier.” If your code is hard to test, you need to change the abstraction or the interface. Tests are the first reuse of your code, so if it’s a pain to use in tests, it’s going to be terrible to use in general.

This is why I teach TDD when I'm teaching agent use to my clients.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#135
post #73
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

So you struggled to improve velocity without AI tools, are you worried that using the AI tools as a crutch will just lead to a death spiral of bad code being shipped increasingly faster? I've only ever seen the AI adoption approach work on fully functional teams.

The concern as well is that by forcing the AI onto developers, they eventually throw their hands up and say "well they dont care about code quality anymore, neither should I" and start shipping absolute vibeslop.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#136
post #73
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

[dead]

Re: What AI coding costs you

#137
post #110
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it feels irresponsible And it is. You are going to end up with a wreck of a product and not a single person you can call upon to fix it. It is your choice and you will pay for it.

A wreck of a product is still better than being out of business by not being able to release fast enough. Unfortunately, the market in general does not reward slow high quality.

You better not ever complain about software again given your view on the importance of quality.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#138

Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudg…

Especially true for junior-mid engineers. The brain stores and comprehends what you tend to repeat.

If I don't solve math problems I won't understand how to solve them, no matter how many times I see videos of people solving similar problems. This is what LLM usage early on will ultimately lead to, and anyone who will claim "oh, by the time I'll be senior the LLM's will be much better than me" only proves my point.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#139
In other engineering fields, no one calculates the numbers for building a plane or a dam by hand anymore. They rely heavily on software for design, simulations, etc. throughout the entire development cycle. Yet, starting in university, those engineers still learn to do those calculations by hand so they comprehend the underlying principles.

IMO, that’s what we should do as software engineers. The idea of letting AI "do the thinking" for you is a bad idea. Sure, it can trivially write a sort function for you. Let it! But you still need to understand how that sort function works. If having the tool was a substitute for understanding the fundamentals, anyone with access to Catia, etc. could design a working airplane.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#140
post #73
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

This is a starker tradeoff, but still the same logic that engineering leaders have used for years to eliminate time for exploration, learning, mentoring, role-switching, and every other activity that makes a better engineer but doesn’t move tickets off the queue. These developers are all going to work somewhere else in a few years, so why should we invest in growing their skills? This isn’t a charity, after all.

I’m sure you’re smarter than that, but a lot of leaders aren’t. And that’s based on the past, when they had an established playbook they could choose to follow, not the situation we’re in now where you have to make it up as you go.

Post reply on HN