What AI coding costs you • Hacker News Board

Re: What AI coding costs you

#141

Post by ako » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

slopinthebag wrote: post #137

ako wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who says that is my view of the importance of quality? My second sentence starts with "unfortunately"...

I'm just recognizing that businesses have challenges to deal with besides quality. Being able to generate revenue is just as important as software quality. And seeing how easily consumers switch to a competing product if it has a few more features, you can't neglect time to market if you want to survive as a company.

Many customers are pretty shallow: "meh, the new version looks just like to old one, nothing has changed" even if under the hood the product has significantly improved.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#142

Post by wrs » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

googamooga wrote: post #45

I 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…

When you let the LLM do the programming, you’re a product manager, not a programmer.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#143

Post by 9dev » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

throwaway346434 wrote: post #133

9dev wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

I'm applying gentle pressure, not forcing everyone to use it. If necessary, I will fight for my team as much as I can, but that's not where we're headed and I would think about switching jobs if it ever is.

Having said that: The dichotomy expressed in the threads here is a bit too extreme for my taste. It's not like working with AI is pure Yes-clicking review dread; there is joy to be found in materialising your ideas out of thin air, instead of the Lego-like puzzle solving experience many developers are used to.

And as mentioned in TFA, There's risk in both using it too little and too much. This also applies to employees, of course: If I shielded junior developers from AI tools, they'd end up in their next job utterly unprepared for what may be required from them as the world keeps spinning.

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

Sure does, but that's not the situation I'm in. I'm trying to figure out the local maximum of keeping my company afloat in a world where AI has kicked the PMF from under our feet to the other end of the playing field, and ensuring my team stays happy, curious, and engaged. And I'm not the only one in this spot, I suppose.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#144

Post by apitman » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

That was a nice collection of brief history, links to research and other articles, and original thoughts.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#145

Post by wrs » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

ryanmcl wrote: post #5

[dead]

Claude Code has a “learning mode” that makes it explain what it’s doing and leave “TODO(human)” placeholders in the code where you have to do part of it.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#146

Post by 9dev » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

wrs wrote: post #140

9dev wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I absolutely see your point there, but I don't have a better answer. It feels like the table stakes for feature development speed have risen all of a sudden, whether we like it or not.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#147

Post by jorvi » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

9dev wrote: post #73

jnovek wrote: 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…

Your team is creating code you don't really grok to "get stuff out the door". Guaranteed a month or year from now this is going to bite you in the ass, hard.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#148

Post by skyberrys » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

Your writeup accurately captures the big concerns I have about using AI coding tools. One extra thing I have noticed around this is I have a similar feeling about driving and self driving. I really love driving but since I was able to better arrange my life and no longer am a commuter driver I don't get as much daily practice so now when I do take the occasional long drive I don't have as much skill and expertise. It is the same with AI coding tools, I need to put them down from time to time and exercise my mental sharpness to prevent losing my abilities to be a senior engineer.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#149

Post by 9dev » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

slopinthebag wrote: post #135

9dev wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> I've only ever seen the AI adoption approach work on fully functional teams.

It's not that the team isn't functioning, it's that it's a pretty diverse team in terms of experience, which means things just used to take a while to finish.

> 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.

This is IMHO avoidable by emphasising code reviews and automated tooling; my general policy is still that everyone is responsible for what they push, period. So absolute vibeslop isn't what I'm seeing, rather an efficiency miscalculation on which parts should be written by humans and which by the AI.

Re: What AI coding costs you

#150

Post by slopinthebag » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

docheinestages wrote: post #17

I think it's important to be conscious of skill atrophy, but I don't see a problem with it if what you're offloading to AI isn't your area of focus. For instance, I don't necessarily want to always know what tricks the compiler is using to compile my program, even if they are pretty smart.

I think Mitchell Hashimoto as a pretty sane take here, where he uses LLM's to offload stuff he doesn't care about / want to think about so he can spend more time and brain power on the stuff that really matters. I tend to agree.