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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#61

Post by adrian_b »

adrian_b wrote: post #12
steveBK123 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More important is whether the productivity improvement is worth a subscription price. Nothing that I have seen until now convinces me about this. On the other hand, I believe that running locally a good open-weights coding assistant, so that you do not have to worry about token price or about exceeding subscription limits in a critical moment, is very worthwhile. This is one thing I also wonder about. If it's a rea…

Such a reckoning is possible when the cost of a subscription is truly predictable. For now, there is a lot of unpredictability in the future cost of AI, whenever you do not host it yourself. If you pay per token, it is extremely hard to predict how many tokens you will need. If you have an apparently fixed subscription, it is very hard to predict whether you will not hit limits in the most inconvenient moment, after…

EDIT:

After I have written the above, that the future cost of externally-hosted AI coding assistants is unpredictable, what I have written was confirmed by an OpenAI press release that the existing Codex users will be migrated during the following weeks towards token-based pricing rates.

Such events will not affect you if you use an open-weights assistant running on your own HW, when you do not have to care about token usage.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#63

Post by lowsong »

csallen wrote: post #55
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

I'll take the other side of this. Professional software engineers like many of us have a big blind spot when it comes to AI coding, and that's a fixation on code quality. It makes sense to focus on code quality. We're not wrong. After all, we've spent our entire careers in the code. Bad code quality slows us down and makes things slow/insecure/unreliable/etc for end users. However, code quality is becoming less and l…

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true.

It's the opposite, code quality is becoming more and more relevant. Before now you could only neglect quality for so long before the time to implement any change became so long as to completely stall out a project.

That's still true, the only thing AI has changed is it's let you charge further and further into technical debt before you see the problems. But now instead of the problems being a gradual ramp up it's a cliff, the moment you hit the point where the current crop of models can't operate on it effectively any more you're completely lost.

> We are in the very earliest months of AI actually being somewhat competent at this. It's unlikely that it will plateau and stop improving.

We hit the plateau on model improvement a few years back. We've only continued to see any improvement at all because of the exponential increase of money poured into it.

> It's only trending in one direction. And it isn't going to stop.

Sure it can. When the bubble pops there will be a question: is using an agent cost effective? Even if you think it is at $200/month/user, we'll see how that holds up once the cost skyrockets after OpenAI and Anthropic run out of money to burn and their investors want some returns.

Think about it this way: If your job survived the popularity of offshoring to engineers paid 10% of your salary, why would AI tooling kill it?

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#64

Post by atomicnumber3 »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

I'm deeply convinced that there's 2 reasons we don't see real takes like this: 1) is because these people are quietly appreciating the 2-50% uplift you get from sanely using LLMs instead of constantly posting sycophantic or doomer shit for clout and/or VC financing. 2) is because the real version of LLM coding is boring and unsexy. It either involves generating slop in one shot to POC, then restarting from scratch for the real thing or doing extensive remediation costing far more than the initial vibe effort cost; or it involves generally doing the same thing we've been doing since the assembler was created except now I don't need to remember off-hand how to rig up boilerplate for a table test harness in ${current_language}, or if I wrote a snippet with string ops and if statements and I wish it were using regexes and named capture groups, it's now easy to mostly-accurately convert it to the other form instead of just sighing and moving on.

But that's boring nerd shit and LLMs didn't change who thinks boring nerd shit is boring or cool.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#66

Post by atomicnumber3 »

csallen wrote: post #60
vlovich123 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Strong disagree. I just watched a team spend weeks trying to make a piece of code work with AI because the vibe coded was spaghetti garbage that even the AI couldn’t tell what needed to be done and was basically playing…

Okay, so you observed one team that had an issue with AI code quality. What's your point? In 1998, I'm sure there were newspaper companies who failed at transitioning online, didn't get any web traffic, had unreliable servers crashed, etc. This says very little about what life would be like for the newspaper industry in 1999, 2000, 2005, 2010, and beyond.

There's almost no point in arguing about this anymore. Neither you nor the other person are going to be convinced. We just have to wait and see if a new crop of 100x productivity AI believer companies come along and unseat all the incumbents.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#67

Post by smj-edison »

The description of working with AI tools really resonates with me. It's dangerous to work on my codebase when I'm tired, since I don't feel like doing it properly, so I play slots with Claude, and stay up later than I should. I usually come back later and realize the final code that gets generated is an absolute mess.

It is really good for getting up to speed with frameworks and techniques though, like they mentioned.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#68

Post by csallen »

lowsong wrote: post #63
csallen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take the other side of this. Professional software engineers like many of us have a big blind spot when it comes to AI coding, and that's a fixation on code quality. It makes sense to focus on code quality. We're not wrong. After all, we've spent our entire careers in the code. Bad code quality slows us down and makes things slow/insecure/unreliable/etc for end users. However, code quality is becoming less and l…

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. It's the opposite, code quality is becoming more and more relevant. Before now you could only neglect quality for so long before the time to implement any change became so long as to completely stall out a project. That…

> That's still true, the only thing AI has changed is it's let you charge further and further into technical debt before you see the problems. But now instead of the problems being a gradual ramp up it's a cliff, the moment you hit the point where the current crop of models can't operate on it effectively any more you're completely lost.

What you're missing is that fewer and fewer projects are going to need a ton of technical depth.

I have friends who'd never written a line of code in their lives who now use multiple simple vibe-coded apps at work daily.

> We hit the plateau on model improvement a few years back. We've only continued to see any improvement at all because of the exponential increase of money poured into it.

The genie is out of the bottle. Humanity is not going to stop pouring more and more money into AI.

> Sure it can. When the bubble pops there will be a question: is using an agent cost effective? Even if you think it is at $200/month/user, we'll see how that holds up once the cost skyrockets after OpenAI and Anthropic run out of money to burn and their investors want some returns.

The AI bubble isn't going to pop. This is like saying the internet bubble is going to pop in 1999. Maybe you will be right about short term economic trends, but the underlying technology is here to stay and will only trend in one direction: better, cheaper, faster, more available, more widely adopted, etc.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#69

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

csallen wrote: post #55
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

I'll take the other side of this. Professional software engineers like many of us have a big blind spot when it comes to AI coding, and that's a fixation on code quality. It makes sense to focus on code quality. We're not wrong. After all, we've spent our entire careers in the code. Bad code quality slows us down and makes things slow/insecure/unreliable/etc for end users. However, code quality is becoming less and l…

I don't buy this at all. Code quality will always matter. Context is king with LLMs, and when you fill that context up with thousands of lines of spaghetti, the LLM will (and does) perform worse. Garbage in, garbage out, that's still the truth from my experience.

Spaghetti code is still spaghetti code. Something that should be a small change ends up touching multiple parts of the codebase. Not only does this increase costs, it just compounds the next time you need to change this feature.

I don't see why this would be a reality that anyone wants. Why would you want an agent going in circles, burning money and eventually finding the answer, if simpler code could get it there faster and cheaper?

Maybe one day it'll change. Maybe there will be a new AI technology which shakes up the whole way we do it. But if the architecture of LLMs stays as it is, I don't see why you wouldn't want to make efficient use of the context window.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#70

Post by devmor »

ffsm8 wrote: post #50
yojo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 I’ve been driving Claude as my primary coding interface the last three months at my job. Other than a different domain, I feel like I could have written this exact article. The project I’m on started as a vibe-coded prototype that quickly got promoted to a production service we sell. I’ve had to build the mental model after the fact, while refactoring and ripping out large chunks of nonsense or dead code. But the…

Fwiw, the article mirrors my experience when I started out too, even exactly with the same first month of vibecoding, then the next project which I did exactly like he outlined too. Personally, I think it's just the natural flow when you're starting out. If he keeps going, his opinion is going to change and as he gets to know it better, he'll likely go more and more towards vibecoding again. It's hard to say why, but…

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