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It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

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161–170 of 194 posts

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely block all LLM comments via pi extension, it makes using them significantly more enjoyable. If the LLM wants to add a comment it must ASK me explicitly to do so. Seeing LLM comments in other peoples code is very upsetting because theres just so much meaningless noise.

What happens when the LLM tries to defy this? Is the file-write rejected, or does the extension just strip comments from what gets written, or just what?

I have it set up to pop up an approval dialogue that shows me the comments its trying to write and if i reject it the model is told essentially "no comments allowed, retry the patch without them."

It usually only takes one of those in the context for the model to reorient its behavior for future edits.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#162
Well, yeah. It used to be you traded money for your time building someone else's dream. Now you do it for free. What kind of value proposition is that?

I love you guys, but number 1 is numero uno, and if the chips are down and I'm working for free, I'm going to be working on myself.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#163
post #3

I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.

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Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#164
post #10

What am I even here for if not to have my own ideas?

That's for you to find out. When we automated muscles in the industrial revolution, people used to value strength. Today they value thought. They may value something else in the future.

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Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#165
post #157
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that happens when you vibe code and just let the LLM be in control of everything. If you take responsibility for the architecture and instruct it to do things properly it will do them properly. You can tell it exactly how to do it or you can ask it to handle it in a way that avoids duplication, you can tell it to design a reusable abstraction for this usecase etc.

>If you take responsibility for the architecture and instruct it to do things properly it will do them properly. The problem here is that after a while it is impossible to detect when such potential abstractions is overlooked in the generated code. Because it has become hard to reason about the existing code. Not all work is green field.

I have wondered about this. Can’t you ask the AI to find the patterns than need abstracting?

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#166
post #148

Ironically, this is why one of the best ways to manage upwards is to prompt managers into coming up with your idea as if it were their own: they’re dramatically more likely to execute and deliver on it. Of course, this also obviously leads to undue credit given for coming up the idea, which is certainly a core problem with AI as well, but it’s still charming to watch managerial psych being rediscovered by this new ge…

Nothing beats the feeling of having a proposed idea dismissed just to have the higher ups “come up” with it some time later. Don’t even dream about getting a footnote mention.

That’s the passive form of the experience, sure — and it often comes as a shock to people that this is a thing in human relations. If you set out to make it happen, and you don’t mind letting someone else execute on the idea, it can be quite fun to manipulate people into an epiphany you arranged for them. (See also teaching, coaching, et al. but with a flipped power differential.)

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed doesn't mean anything if you end up driving off a cliff.

Evidence so far does not suggest people driving off a cliff so while a valid concern it's not a likely one. We also acknowledged that the benefit of using a vehicle is such that it outnumbers the risks it may introduce. We never said there will be no risks attached.

We’ve only been on this train for 3-4 years, and in that period, we’ve already invented terms for this kind of vibe-coded, highly-breakable crud. We’ve also had a few, relatively high-profile in their spheres bugs come out and hurt people’s real, lived experiences.

And that’s just the stuff where the house of cards failed quickly.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#168
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I admit that I'm finally getting into this "let Claude help you write code" stuff, and I'm enjoying it a bit for the stuff I, honestly, just don't want to write; but ... I still read it. I still review it. I still look at the code like I'm peer-reviewing it and go, "Uh ... I don't like this area at all. That's going to be really hard to debug at 3am" and so on. I guess my thought / question is: this is your code.…

The problem, in my experience is: 1. It writes SO MUCH code, in minutes, that theres no way I as a human can review it. 2. I am not very motivated to read/review this code anyway: it was cheaply written, by some _thing_ that is not going to improve from my feedback. 3. If you DO review it conscientiously , it becomes a never ending thing: you keep finding issue upon issue. 4. If you report the issues for fixes, the f…

Route A seems genuinely horrifying to me - maybe not for small and/or helper scripts; but for anything substantial. For anything that bites you or someone else hard when things go bad.

I don’t want a vibe-coded, mass-produced diabetes tracking app, or banking tool, or tax management software. I don’t want a vibe-coded power grid analysis software.

I don’t care if a person’s little, local scripting thing is vibe-coded. I don’t care if an artist’s 0->1 game code is vibe-coded; but that’s not what a lot of the things we’re talking about here really are.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#169
post #31

I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no less) made the comment "well, my secret is that I think about physics all the time" I started practicing this for the stuff I'm interested in ... and the result is that I generate a lot of ide…

There seems to be two schools of thought for "second brain" stuff: 1. Those who kind of semi-obsessively write down every little thought, semi-obsessively catalogue everything, etc. 2. Those who use the idea of "writing helps you think", where the second brain functions in support of this Personally I find 2 quite valuable, and although I could "think about programming all the time" (or one of my other interests), I…

I’m in a third school: memory recall ability does not scale to meet the needs of interests and responsibilities. I’ll take all the help I can get.

I keep obsidian vaults mostly to augment recall, and often all it takes is a small cue to reveal that thing I couldn’t remember. I’ve found LLMs helpful for translating my question into search criteria - “agentic search” is magic.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evidence so far does not suggest people driving off a cliff so while a valid concern it's not a likely one. We also acknowledged that the benefit of using a vehicle is such that it outnumbers the risks it may introduce. We never said there will be no risks attached.

We’ve only been on this train for 3-4 years, and in that period, we’ve already invented terms for this kind of vibe-coded, highly-breakable crud. We’ve also had a few, relatively high-profile in their spheres bugs come out and hurt people’s real, lived experiences. And that’s just the stuff where the house of cards failed quickly.

Software by definition has always been and will remain broken in one or another way. AI makes no difference or whatsoever. Arguably, it will help raising the quality of software.
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