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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

#71

Post by mnsc »

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.

But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. In 2020 people predicted that Facebook Horizon would only go one direction, always improve and become as pervasive as the internet. So when you predict that the design and architecture capabilities of models will continue to improve, thus making code quality irrelevant, you sound very confident. And if in five years you are right, you will brag about it here. If not, well I for one will not track you down and rub it in your face. Peace out.

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

#72

Post by ulf-77723 »

smj-edison wrote: post #67

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…

Same for me. What I liked about the article was the emphasis on the mental model. Staying up late using the a lot machine is not helping me to remember the model better

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

#73

Post by devmor »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #64
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 fo…

There’s also just the negative association factor.

I use LLMs in my every day work. I’m also a strong critic of LLMs and absolutely loathe the hype cycle around them.

I have done some really cool things with copilot and Claude and I keep sharing them to within my working circle because I simply don’t want to interact that much with people who aren’t grounded on the subject.

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

#74

Post by layer8 »

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.

It seems that your opinion is based on expectations for the future then, which is notoriously difficult to predict.

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

#76

Post by csallen »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #69
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…

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…

I didn't say that you "want" spaghetti code or that spaghetti code is good.

I said that (a) apps are getting simpler and smaller in scope and so their code quality matters less, and (b) AI is getting better at writing good code.

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

#78

Post by csallen »

layer8 wrote: post #74
csallen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems that your opinion is based on expectations for the future then, which is notoriously difficult to predict.

It's not that hard to predict that obviously useful new technology is going to improve over time.

Guns, wheels, cars, ships, batteries, televisions, the internet, smartphones, airplanes, refrigeration, electric lighting, semiconductors, GPS, solar panels, antibiotics, printing presses, steam engines, radio, etc. The pattern is obvious, the forces are clear and well-studied.

If there is (1) a big gap between current capabilities and theoretical limits, (2) huge incentives for those who to improve things, (3) no alternative tech that will replace or outcompete it, (4) broad social acceptance and adoption, and (5) no chance of the tech being lost or forgotten, then technological improvement is basically a guarantee.

These are all obviously true of AI coding.

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

#79

Post by marhee »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #64
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 fo…

Software engineering is only about 20% writing code (the famous 40-20-40 split). Most people use it only for the first 40%, and very succesfully (im in that camp). If you use it to write your code you can theorettically maybe get 20% time improvement initially, but you loose a lot of time later redoing it or unraveling. Not worth bothering.

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

#80

Post by lowsong »

csallen wrote: post #68
lowsong wrote: post #63

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. 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…

> 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.

Again it's the opposite. A landscape of vibe coded micro apps is a landscape of buggy, vulnerable, points of failure. When you buy a product, software or hardware, you do more than buy the functionality you buy the assurance it will work. AI does not change this. Vibe code an app to automate your lightbulbs all you like, but nobody is going to be paying millions of dollars a year on vibe coded slop apps and apps like that is what keeps the tech industry afloat.

> Humanity is not going to stop pouring more and more money into AI.

There's no more money to pour into it. Even if you did, we're out of GPU capacity and we're running low on the power and infrastructure to run these giant data centres, and it takes decades to bring new fabs or power plants online. It is physically impossible to continue this level of growth in AI investment. Every company that's invested into AI has done so on the promise of increased improvement, but the moment that stops being true everything shifts.

> The AI bubble isn't going to pop. This is like saying the internet bubble is going to pop in 1999.

The internet bubble did pop. What happened after is an assessment of how much the tech is actually worth, and the future we have now 26 years later bears little resemblance to the hype in 1999. What makes you think this will be different?

Once the hype fades, the long-term unsuitability for large projects becomes obvious, and token costs increase by ten or one hundred times, are businesses really going to pay thousands of dollars a month on agent subscriptions to vibe code little apps here and there?

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