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AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

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Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#111

Post by darkerside »

tovej wrote: post #48
budsniffer952 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the opposite: people like you will be telling people using these tools successfully, "but where are all great new products???", which, of course, is almost immeasurable. The Internet is a better fax machine and all that.

Who is using them successfully and what _are_ the great new products? Examples, please. It's easy to prove your point if it's true.

This question is a trap. Like programming languages. There's the products everybody hates and the ones nobody uses.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#112

Post by morganf »

watwut wrote: post #29
jillesvangurp wrote: post #18

There's going to be plenty of work helping other companies make some sense of their vibe coded efforts. The value of individual projects might decrease, but there will be a lot more of them. And without help they won't actually work out all that well. I talked to a company that does not employ software engineers that were doing some things with Claude Code a few weeks ago. Insightful comment: I want that person to do…

> Insightful comment: I want that person to do what I hired them to do, not mess around with code. What does that mean? Who is that person who should not mess with the code?

I agree strongly with that comment you are quoting.

It means (at least in my interpretation): different people think differently; a great salesman thinks very differently than a great software developer. And the AI wave is trying to force lots of everyday normal employees (who may or may not be good at their jobs already) to think and act like software developers. A great salesman may literally not have the type of mind where we can turn what he does into "processes" and "documentation" like we need to do to make agents. Most humans, by far, don't think in a "process" sort of way, and trying to get them to do so is a path towards disaster on many levels.

This is why most AI digital transformation is failing. Making a creative artist or a salesman or a chef or account manager or whatever into "one of us" (a someone who thinks explicitly about process-itizing everything etc) is, the fallacy of.... well, to use an old Yiddish expression: "if my grandma had balls, she'd be my grandpa." (Sorry for the vulgar image.) It's asking people to be a completely different type of person than they are, and that almost never succeeds.

I've done a lot digital transformation (pre-AI) and my approach was always to not try to change people, but to have a small group of smart process-oriented thinkers go into teams and work hand in hand with them to turn what they do into processes.

PS: all this is said as someone who loves AI and is a huge fan and has invested heavily in it.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#113

Post by schnebbau »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #46

I'm about to throw away multiple months of LLM generated code for one of my side projects. I was really careful writing design specs and it wasn't even a new code base the LLM worked on, but still after several months of AI changes I feel my code degraded more and more into a subtle mess. Hard to explain, each individual change looked good and logical and on the surface the codebase looks fine, but looking at the who…

This has happened to my side project too. There's so much going on in the code now that I can't possibly grok it to make changes safely by myself any more. But I think that's OK. Because I don't have to grok it anymore.

I've been crafting beautiful code for almost 20 years - that itch is scratched. Now I just want to be productive and build cool stuff. AI is helping me make a better end-product in a fraction of the time. As long as codex understands what's going on in the ball of spaghetti, there's no problem. Sure - if I was working in enterprise then this is no good. But for personal projects and small indie shops, it's fine.

AI is just a new layer on top of the stack now. In the same way high-level languages are a layer on top of writing machine code manually. You just need to let go.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#114

Post by x______________ »

cyanydeez wrote: post #99
mmcnl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recognize this, LLMs never stop, they pursue the dead end at all costs.

some of the problems ya'llk encountering would be solved with dumber and slower local models.

Some of the problems I solved after a few attempts where the llm couldn't solve the issue was by dumbing down the prompts.. ...

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#115

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

Kiro wrote: post #43
budsniffer952 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popped over to HackerNews, read two comment sections and the top comments in both articles were users saying the same thing: "AI can't write code! The whole thing will come crumbling down any minute! Just you wait!" I've never seen this community like this. Are these people cooked? We are years into this and they haven't been able to figure it out? They are going to continue to tell people using these tools successfu…

Yeah, it's baffling. I can't relate to these statements at all. What are people doing? Surely the smart people of HN would have been able to figure this out a long time ago. I also don't find these people in real life. Even the most junior developers I know are able to navigate this without creating this supposed mess.

I've seen two camps of people within the same company I work at. Some think AI is generating acceptable code. Others think it's generating slop.

I sit in the middle a lot of the time as my opinion on code quality vary depending on how important the code actually is.

I will say one thing, the people who I generally deemed as worse developers prior to the wide AI roll out are the ones that are more accepting of AI code. And consequently, they're the ones spending a magnitude more money each day. The people who were writing better code and, in my opinion, were stronger developers, are spending less on AI and are generating more acceptable code when they use it. And they can spot issues from a mile away, because they actually understand the code being generated. They're not just committing lots of redundant code.

We had an AI outage for a day or two a few weeks back. The reaction from some people was like it was the end of the world and they couldn't do any work. Some projects got put on hold because no one actually knew how to work on the code base without AI. Other, better in my opinion, developers just went shrugged it off and got on with their job.

AI over-dependence is a big issue that people will face more and more. Weaker juniors used to just be a bit slower and stagnate a bit, but they could still kinda work independently and understand what they were doing. Now they are almost entirely prompt monkeys, take away their Claude Code terminal and they are completely stumped.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#116

Post by Bootvis »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #69
budsniffer952 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popped over to HackerNews, read two comment sections and the top comments in both articles were users saying the same thing: "AI can't write code! The whole thing will come crumbling down any minute! Just you wait!" I've never seen this community like this. Are these people cooked? We are years into this and they haven't been able to figure it out? They are going to continue to tell people using these tools successfu…

Interesting. What product and/or project have you successfully launched with it?

I have solo built this:

https://github.com/bobjansen/Ibex

Ibex is a usable DSL for table manipulation that is quite fast

https://bobjansen.github.io/Ibex/benchmarks.html

I'm still managing to add more features, such as multithreading. The LLM's do make mistakes but they have gotten better and they tend to self correct these days. I'm also comparing results to mature products such as Polars and DuckDB and the results match.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#117

Post by skydhash »

Kiro wrote: post #43
budsniffer952 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popped over to HackerNews, read two comment sections and the top comments in both articles were users saying the same thing: "AI can't write code! The whole thing will come crumbling down any minute! Just you wait!" I've never seen this community like this. Are these people cooked? We are years into this and they haven't been able to figure it out? They are going to continue to tell people using these tools successfu…

Yeah, it's baffling. I can't relate to these statements at all. What are people doing? Surely the smart people of HN would have been able to figure this out a long time ago. I also don't find these people in real life. Even the most junior developers I know are able to navigate this without creating this supposed mess.

It’s not a mess as in spaghetti code, which you will find with novice programmers. It’s a mess as in complex and disjointed codebase. Happy path works somewhat, but it crumbles if you run it long enough or encounters an edge case.

You need a very good level of insight to build a codebase to do what is supposed to do, to not do what it shouldn’t do, and to still be comprehensible. Because a software is a system and building system well is what engineering is about.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#118

Post by StilesCrisis »

tlh wrote: post #72
ThePhysicist wrote: post #46

I'm about to throw away multiple months of LLM generated code for one of my side projects. I was really careful writing design specs and it wasn't even a new code base the LLM worked on, but still after several months of AI changes I feel my code degraded more and more into a subtle mess. Hard to explain, each individual change looked good and logical and on the surface the codebase looks fine, but looking at the who…

I’ve found it very useful to leverage the “speed” of AI to iron out all of the UX-questions of a greenfield side project (an organiser for a/my family). My first aim is to get to what feels like v1 feature-completeness. My approach is building out the feature, dogfooding it for a few days, work out the bits I don’t like, adjusting, and then rinse and repeating. I don’t like the finer UI details (the colours it’s chos…

Isn't this just what the article already says? Great prototypes, but that's as far as it gets.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#119

Post by microtonal »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #65
ThePhysicist wrote: post #46

I'm about to throw away multiple months of LLM generated code for one of my side projects. I was really careful writing design specs and it wasn't even a new code base the LLM worked on, but still after several months of AI changes I feel my code degraded more and more into a subtle mess. Hard to explain, each individual change looked good and logical and on the surface the codebase looks fine, but looking at the who…

[flagged]

Why is the answer of LLM-maximalists always you are holding it wrong?

I think a lot of experienced programmers, who have adopted LLMs early on, have the same finding: yes, LLMs give a great productivity boost. No, you cannot let agents completely wild without plenty of human supervision, because it will lead to a big ball of mud and atrophy knowledge of humans. I think these are relevant data points and they should be taken into account during the adoption of LLMs.

This type of LLM-maximalist thinking is thoroughly anti-scientific, they want to throw away data points that are not in line with the hypothesis they want to see confirmed at all cost.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#120

Post by jdw64 »

mikojan wrote: post #82
jdw64 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In today's massive applications, the number of people who can see the entire structure is very limited—yet commercial applications still work. And I think GPT Codex and the products from AI companies are, at least for now, working reasonably well. Of course, it depends on your baseline for quality. But here's what I think is the core point: Modern SaaS applications have become significantly more complex compared to o…

We have been building complex software before and we continue to do so. The question is where is this mythical codebase 10 times more complex then the Linux kernel that we were previously unable to produce? Or let it just be complex software. Where is it? What are the names?

The real problem is that we forget that there was a lot of bad code in the early days.

When I studied books from 10 to 15 years ago, the patterns that were considered 'common practice' back then would be considered low-quality code today.

Our threshold has risen. People tend to forget the rings of experience embedded in community codebases and only look at the final results.

And they always claim that only the best results represent their community.

But the 'bad results' were also produced by the same community.

From that perspective, I think the floor has risen significantly. You might disagree. People with name recognition in open source usually only see the 'best' code.

But I mostly see the 'worst' code.

This is an issue of accessibility depending on your environment. I work for $15 an hour, as a freelancer doing subcontracting work in Korea, so I mostly see the worst of the worst. In that context, AI code quality feels like a huge improvement.

Because in closed source codebases, there's plenty of low quality code.

In contrast, open source projects tend to curate only the best code, driven by visibility and reputation. I think that difference is significant.

You might not agree with me. And that's fine. We all have our own value systems. I don't agree with you, and you probably don't agree with me. That's a natural consequence of us being different people.

But here's what I think: I respect you, but our views can differ. I think your point is valid in certain contexts, but I stand by mine.

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