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I created my first AI-assisted pull request

nelson.cloud

61–70 of 83 posts

Re: I created my first AI-assisted pull request

#61
post #36
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, American tomatoes are generally terrible source, am Romanian.

If you buy the variety most often found in American grocery stores (usually labeled as Roma tomatoes), they're terrible. Try the variety labeled as "tomatoes on the vine" (four-digit produce code 4664, which I know from memory, having punched it in to so many self-checkout scanners over the years). They're actually juicy and tasty the way tomatoes should be. Avoid Roma tomatoes, they're cardboard masquerading as a to…

"Globe" tomatoes are much, much more common as generics in American supermarkets. Sometimes also "Beefsteak" variety. Roma tomatoes are almost exclusively used in making sauce.

Re: I created my first AI-assisted pull request

#62
When I read stuff like this, I get concerned about how big the knowledge gaps for some people really are. How crazy is the time pressure that reviewing the code is a big deal? What is there to "learn"? That's not what code review is about.

As long as you understand it before committing, you own your version of it now. There's no way in hell I'd waste time playing the slot machine. I am perfectly capable of writing the exact missing parts I need to integrate and move on quickly. How is this any different from SO copypasta a decade ago? Just like that wasn't always the right tool for the job, neither is "AI".

This sounds like a completely different problem than AI usage itself. My time is most valuable making decisions for the project. Yes, the vast majority of those decisions involve the code for the implementation details, but I just need clean simple code that does the job and that anyone or anything can easily change later. The AI doesn't always give that to me, and sometimes neither do other humans. That's why I'm employed. That's what it really means to be a maintainer and contribute.

Re: I created my first AI-assisted pull request

#63
post #58
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steve Jobs was all about fun By every account I’ve seen, Steve Jobs cared that the users of the product were having fun. He did not care at all how much fun the people building the product had.

It's well documented that people enjoyed working at Apple under Steve - pain and pleasure come together when working on stuff that's insanely great. If your idea of fun is doing no work then you're delusional. Now that we're here, it should also be noted Steve did not make decisions based on 'maximizing shareholder wealth'. Rather doing the right things on the top line (creating great products and telling people abou…

I think you may be caught in the distortion field.

Re: I created my first AI-assisted pull request

#64
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you eat a strawberry do you feel like an impostor for not growing it yourself? No, but if I asked an intern to eat it for me, I wouldn't feel like I did anything or experienced anything at all. That's what LLM coding feels like--like I'm not doing anything meaningful. It's like hiring someone to love my kid for me.

> No, but if I asked an intern to eat it for me, I wouldn't feel like I did anything at all. That's a poor analogy. If I asked an intern to implement a function, I know I did the instruction and that I worked through them. The intern did work, but I did fancy high level work and killed several birds with one stone. Even better analogy: if I'm a film director, I'm working through a lot of people. The DP, the cast, the…

So yeah, our job that we were all interested in has transformed into a different thing (directing), which some people are also interested in, and some aren't.

There's no substantive difference between directing an intern and directing people on a movie, by the way, except the number of people. If you never aspired to direct people, it's all kind of the same, and if you actively dislike it, I imagine directing more people would probably be worse!

Re: I created my first AI-assisted pull request

#65
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they also care to a certain extent because how something is built has a direct impact on the output as well.

They care about outcomes. I don't know that you're going to be able to draw an especially compelling line to programmer excitement and fulfillment and any of those outcome factors, though.

I'm agreeing with the other person that they do care about how it's built, not that they care about how much fun the programmers are having...

Re: I created my first AI-assisted pull request

#66
I love the description of the PR. This type of honest statement is the right thing to do - be transparent, be respectful of the time of the reviewer.

> This PR adds support for embedded Ruby (ERB) which is commonly used in Ruby on Rails projects. Note that I used heavy assistance from Claude Code and tried to ensure it didn't generate slop to the best of my abilities. All tests are passing and I also visually verified the end result which looks solid to me.

> Here's a screenshot that was generated by building the Chroma CLI with the ERB lexer and running it against the test data file with chroma --lexer=erb --style=monokai --html lexers/testdata/erb.actual

Re: I created my first AI-assisted pull request

#67
post #8

This is the wrong way to think about tool use. You wanted this feature for years. You understood the problem, but the amount of time that it would have taken to properly implement and test it held you back from doing it. Obviously, anyone else who wanted this feature came to the same conclusion. This new tool reduced the amount of time that it would take. So you used the tool. You used the tool to bring the feature i…

The blog post discusses this point directly. Did you read it?

What makes you think they didn't read it? The comment is a direct response to the blog post. They just think the post is wrong.

Disagreement != Lack of understanding.

Re: I created my first AI-assisted pull request

#68

It seems like the author feels like a fraud because they successfully made a contribution without learning anything. The quality of a contribution is not a function of how much you learned or grew while you made it. Learning and growth are part of your compensation for making the contribution. The author is not a fraud for not learning anything. If anything, it seems like they should feel short-changed! When voluntar…

I learn a lot from code I read, but don’t write. Did the author not read the code and simply threw it over the fence?

Re: I created my first AI-assisted pull request

#69
post #8

This is the wrong way to think about tool use. You wanted this feature for years. You understood the problem, but the amount of time that it would have taken to properly implement and test it held you back from doing it. Obviously, anyone else who wanted this feature came to the same conclusion. This new tool reduced the amount of time that it would take. So you used the tool. You used the tool to bring the feature i…

I'd like to adjust your metaphor.

As a woodworker who owns both hand tools and power tools, I don't feel bad when I spend most of a project cutting the repetitive pieces with a motorized saw. I also don't feel like a snob because I prefer certain hand saws under certain circumstances.

To me, the metaphor is pretty solid for coding LLMs. A motorized saw, to anyone that's used them, takes away all the pain and complexity of using a hand saw for the same work, but it also introduces its own complexity and pain. There's also things that stay consistent: I still find myself transferring or measuring certain ways, I still have to brace the piece, I still need jigs (albeit different ones).

Re: I created my first AI-assisted pull request

#70
post #8

This is the wrong way to think about tool use. You wanted this feature for years. You understood the problem, but the amount of time that it would have taken to properly implement and test it held you back from doing it. Obviously, anyone else who wanted this feature came to the same conclusion. This new tool reduced the amount of time that it would take. So you used the tool. You used the tool to bring the feature i…

i like the exosuit analogy.. if you cant lift something because its heavy, but have an exo suit that will let you lift it... does that make you feel like a fraud? AI is like that its a tool. you;re still responsible for the use of it and the output of it. you need to understand that if you use that exo suit to hurt someone or use it poorly and damage something/someone.. thats entirely on you. just like a knife in you…

No need to invent a fictional exosuit. We already have real machines that augment our physical abilities like cars and excavators and such

Anyways, you ever seen the average excavator pilot? They're often very physically unhealthy

I predict the average LLM pilot will be similarly mentally unhealthy

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