When a code doesn't compile, it doesn't kill anyone. But if a Waymo suddenly veers off the road, it creates a real threat. Waymos had to be safer than real human drivers for people to begin to trust them. Coding tools did not have to be better than humans for them to be adopted first. Its entirely possible for a human to make a catastrophic error. I imagine in the future, it will be more likely that a human makes such errors, just like its more likely that a human will make more errors driving a car.
AI coding is gambling
101–110 of 471 posts
Re: AI coding is gambling
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I get a huge rush of dopamine seeing LLMs build out complex features very quickly to the point that it will keep me up all night wanting to push further and further. That's where the gambling metaphor really resonates. It's not whether or not the output is correct, I've been building software for many years and I know how direct LLMs pretty well at this point. But I'm also an alcoholic in recovery and I k…
> Personally, I get a huge rush of dopamine seeing LLMs build out complex features very quickly I dont think i've read a sentence on this website i can relate to less. I watch the LLM build things and it feels completely numb, i may as well be watching paint dry. It means nothing to me.
I wonder if the difference here is age/experience or what you're working on/in.
When I was 20, writing code was interesting, by the time I was 28 it became "solving the problem" and then moved on to "I only really enjoy a good disaster to clean up".
All of my time has been spent solving other peoples problems, so I was never invested in the domain that much.
Re: AI coding is gambling
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poker is a skill-based game where your actions influence your success, but many people who play it are gambling.
And that's why poker is a poor metaphor for agentic coding.
It's the perfect metaphor? Playing correctly/optimally is +EV. But nobody starts there, and many people don't ever get there.
The main difference is that you're exploiting your own weaknesses, rather than others'. Limitations in typing speed, information gathering, pattern recognition.
Re: AI coding is gambling
#104All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…
> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane, because I literally haven't written a line of code myself in months
This is exactly the sort of mentality that makes me hate this technology
You finally feel good at programming despite admitting that you aren't actually doing it
Please explain why anyone should take this seriously?
Re: AI coding is gambling
#105It is and will always be about: 1) properly defining the spec 2) ensuring the implementation satisfies said spec
> properly defining the spec Why do you often need to re-prompt things like "can you simplify this and make it more human readable without sacrificing performance?". No amount of specification addresses this on the first shot unless you already know the exact implementation details in which case you might as well write it yourself directly. I often have to put in a prompt like this 5-10 times before the code resemble…
There's two secret sauces to making Claude Code your b* (please forgive me future AI overlords), one is to create a spec, the other is to not prompt merely "what" you want and only what you want, but what you want, HOW you want it done (you can get insanely detailed or just vague enough), and even in some cases the why is useful to know and understand, WHO its for sometimes as well. Give it the context you know, don't know anything about the code? Ask it to read it, all of it, you've got 1 million tokens, go for it.
I have one shot prompted projects from empty folder to full feature web app with accounts, login, profiles, you name it, insanely stable, maybe and oops here or there, but for a non-spec single prompt shot, that's impressive.
When I don't use a tool to handle the task management I have Claude build up a markdown spec file for me and specify everything I can think of. Output is always better when you specify technology you want to use, design patterns.
Re: AI coding is gambling
#106You got to know when to Ship it, Know when to Re-prompt, Know when to Clear the Context, And know when to RLHF. You never trust the Output, When you’re staring at the diff view, There’ll (not) be time enough for Fixing, When the Tokens are all spent.
> When you’re staring at the diff view,
Bold assumption that people are looking at the diffs at all. They leave that for their coworkers agents.
Re: AI coding is gambling
#107This "slot machine" metaphor is played out. If you're just entering a coin's worth of information and nudging it over and over in the hopes of getting something good, that's a you problem, not a Claude problem. If, on the other hand, you treat it like a hyper-competent collaborator, and follow good project management and development practices, you're golden.
> If, on the other hand, you treat it like a hyper-competent collaborator, and follow good project management and development practices, you're golden. I am consistently using 100% of my weekly $200 max plan. I know how this thing works, I know how to get value out of it, and I wish what you said were true. If you do all of these things? You are in a better spot. You are in a far better spot than if you hadn't! Setti…
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Re: AI coding is gambling
#108This "slot machine" metaphor is played out. If you're just entering a coin's worth of information and nudging it over and over in the hopes of getting something good, that's a you problem, not a Claude problem. If, on the other hand, you treat it like a hyper-competent collaborator, and follow good project management and development practices, you're golden.
_hyper-competent collaborator who may completely make things up occasionally and will sometimes give different answers to the same question*_
So, indistinguishable from a human then
Re: AI coding is gambling
#109> But this doesn't really resemble coding. An act that requires a lot of thinking and writing long detailed code.
Does it? It did in the past. Now it doesn't. Maybe "add a button to display a colour selector" really is the canonical way to code that feature, and the 100+ lines of generated code are just a machine language artifact like binary.
> But it robs me of the part that’s best for the soul. Figuring out how this works for me, finding the clever fix or conversion and getting it working. My job went from connecting these two things being the hard and reward part, to just mopping up how poorly they’ve been connected.
Skill issue. Two nights ago, I used Claude to write an iOS app to convert Live Photos into gifs. No other app does it well. I'm going to publish it as my first app. I wouldn't have bothered to do it without AI, and my soul feels a lot better with it.
Re: AI coding is gambling
#110I think this article makes a valid point. However, if AI coding is considered gambling, then being a project manager overseeing multiple developers could also be seen as a form of gambling to a certain degree. In reality, there isn't much difference between the two. AI models are non-deterministic, and humans are also non-deterministic. You could assign the same task to two different developers and end up with entirely different results.