[flagged]
Grief and the AI split
31–40 of 404 posts
Re: Grief and the AI split
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're using it as a 'super compiler', effectively a code generator and your .md file is the new abstraction level at which you code. But there is a price to pay: the code that you generate is not the code that you understand and when things go pear shaped you will find that that deterministic element that made compilers so successful is missing from code generated from specs dumped into an AI. If you one-shot it you…
>A friend of mine just proved this to his boss by bribing an AI with a 'nice batch of pure random data' to put a piece of unreviewed code into production by giving itself the privileges required to do so... Okay that's pretty hilarious. Everyone has a vice!
There is a chapter two to the story but I don't want to out my friend. You never know who reads HN.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#33[flagged]
Re: Grief and the AI split
#34This sounds right to me: > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. Helps explain why some people are d…
Eh, it also feels like a classic "maybe we somehow have enough perspective on this watershed moment while it's happening to explain it with a simplistic dichotomy". Even this piece interrogates the feeling of "loss" and teases out multiple aspects to it, but settles on a tl;dr of "yep, dichotomy". There's more axes here too, where that feeling can depend on what you're building, who you're building it with, time and position in your career, etc etc.
(I'll admit, though, that this also smells to me a bit too much like introvert/extrovert, or INTP/INTJ/etc so maybe I'm being reflexively rejective)
Re: Grief and the AI split
#35This reminds me of the divide between Role-players and Number-chasers in the once-upon-a-time MUD players communities.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#36Lots of mentions of the term mourning... As they say in my country, don't sell the skin until you kill the bear. All I'm seeing around me is people dropping best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code! This is going to blow up. Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that…
>This is going to blow up. We are way past wringing our hands over agentic engineering. Every startup and all fast moving companies are onboard. They don't hand code anymore. There will not be some code quality crisis that will stop everyone in their tracks. I'm trying to cope with this too, but I don't think the best path is praying for failure.
That's absolutely not true. The places that have embraced "agentic engineering" are mostly garbage factories, and lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. I recognize that most of the people on this site are just trying to self-promote for their own gig, but the level of misinformation is sometimes just staggering.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're using it as a 'super compiler', effectively a code generator and your .md file is the new abstraction level at which you code. But there is a price to pay: the code that you generate is not the code that you understand and when things go pear shaped you will find that that deterministic element that made compilers so successful is missing from code generated from specs dumped into an AI. If you one-shot it you…
We have human reviews on every PR. Quality and consistency are going up , not down. Partially because the agents follow the guidance much more closely than humans do and there is far less variance. Shortcuts that a human would make ("I'll just write a one-off here"), the agent does not...so long as our rules guide it properly ("Let me find existing patterns in the codebase."). Part of it is the investment in docs we'…
> Partially because the agents follow the guidance much more closely than humans do and there is far less variance.
Ouch. Managing human coders has been described as herding cats (with some justice). Getting humans to follow standards is... challenging. And exhausting.
Getting AIs to do so... if you get the rules right, and if the tool doesn't ignore the rules, then you should be good. And if you're not, you still have human reviews. And the AI doesn't get offended if you reject the PR because it didn't follow the rules.
This is actually one of the best arguments for AIs that I have seen.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#38Lots of mentions of the term mourning... As they say in my country, don't sell the skin until you kill the bear. All I'm seeing around me is people dropping best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code! This is going to blow up. Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that…
I was still skeptical at the start of this year, but there seems to be a shift underway. Found the StrongDM Dark Factory docs in Feb and they've netted novel results that have been inspiring enough to keep studying and practicing.
https://factory.strongdm.ai/techniques
https://factory.strongdm.ai/products/attractor
If you've found better or ancillary resources, please share.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#39I just do not want to deal with other people's AI-generated code.
Re: Grief and the AI split
#40Author doesn't care about their blog writing as craft, either (it's been fed through an LLM.)