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AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

hermit-tech.com

61–70 of 183 posts

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#61
post #51
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's the manager - that's like corporate root privileges

Manager has rights to approve themselves... Access control working as designed.

At worst, needs another manager to approve. Now they can both saddle up on the velocity/time to market wave... together. The racket begins in earnest.

How does a manager do this, they ask? I answer: the same way they do everything. Lunch. If the effort fails, at least they tried! Deck chairs, Titanic, etc.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#62
post #30
post #5

“I wanted to see if I can get in on this 10x magic. I decided to put my money where my mouth was and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits to use with a project I was working on.“ Wow. I guess that’s the punchline!

I got here and... I agreed with everything up to this point. The author makes a good point. If you don't know what you're doing, AI accelerates that. No question. But they put a whopping... ten bucks into using DeepSeek and weren't impressed with the initial results. I know they try to cover this with "you just aren't prompting correctly!" but if, in 2026, you aren't able to have an LLM generate decent quality code..…

[deleted]

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#63

The code smell in my repos are at an all time high and I'm a senior dev, can't image how worse vibe coders have it.

I think it depends on what area of the world you work. We recenty had one of our plant managers build a web portal to keep track of some of our operational tech, with features you wouldn't find in standard products. I've been turning it into a container app that can actually deploy safely into our cloud infrastrcture. It's quite frankly better quality than what most external software companies have provided us with i…

By coincidence, we've been building software for five years that other plant managers are now considering using to keep track of some operational metrics. And I don't think we should put LLMs into our development cycle, simply because the data our software is built for can have critical meaning in some situations.

The insecurity in a vibe-coded web portal isn't that someone hacks it with XSS, it's that after the next vibe-coded release, some X quietly becomes −Y somewhere no one expects.

From this perspective, having no software at all might be better, or as in your case, safer.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#64
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You describe my experience with Claude (except my gut feeling is that system prompts and especially skills are useless, and I've even done limited testing that agrees with that). However, your discourse is not the usual borderline religious discourse that's used by LLM advocates. You're not extreme enough either pro or against LLMs :)

> except my gut feeling is that system prompts and especially skills are useless I tend to agree. Not with the extreme version of this statement: there are some genuinely useful instructions I give in my Claude.md and prompts. Comment style, how much to push back, which subagents to orchestrate for tests, reviews, etc. But I've tried the single-sentence versions of those and versions with multiple files of long promp…

> Comment style, how much to push back, which subagents to orchestrate for tests, reviews, etc.

Are those "skills" or just instructions?

My definition for "skills" is the "you are the greatest software architect ever born" type bullshit.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#65
> Most apps these days gather credit card details

That's one of the few consumer-facing areas where there are still standards in place, namely PCI-DSS. As far as I know the audits require the name of a human who is responsible for payment security. Card companies can one-hit kill your startup if you're breaking those rules (maybe purely blockchain startups are exempt).

Yes, you can offload this to stripe, but then your app should never see the card number and certainly not the CVV. You end up storing these, even by accident, both stripe and the card companies will hate you.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#66
post #3

> Uses only DeepSeek and comes to the conclusion that LLM's are bad at coding? Why not use actual frontier models, and you know do some real research, before writing a blog post?

DeepSeek has been the most used model on open router by far, only temporarily overtaken by ox alpha when it was free, so it's the most representative experience

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#67
> and ruining the quality of internet search engines.

Tbf, I'm not sure we can really lay this one at the feet of GenAI. The SEO bros had pretty thoroughly ruined search before LLMs took off - the process just accelerated a little at that point.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#68

The code smell in my repos are at an all time high and I'm a senior dev, can't image how worse vibe coders have it.

I think it depends on what area of the world you work. We recenty had one of our plant managers build a web portal to keep track of some of our operational tech, with features you wouldn't find in standard products. I've been turning it into a container app that can actually deploy safely into our cloud infrastrcture. It's quite frankly better quality than what most external software companies have provided us with i…

With the models we got at out disposal, you can easily deploy a kickass internal tool, it's fine even for mvp's unless you're not handling sensitive user data, shooting yourself in the foot is easier than ever, and talking about code smell for most application (especially frontend) does it even matter?

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#69
post #3

> Uses only DeepSeek and comes to the conclusion that LLM's are bad at coding? Why not use actual frontier models, and you know do some real research, before writing a blog post?

> do some real research It is funny that only real research on productivity gains from AI shows at best very minimal gains, but AI bros will always tell you "no no no, you have used wrong model, try a different one, there are more of them, you have to try, trust me" and call that a "research".

Ah yes I'm an AI bro because I said the author must do thorough testing before coming to a conclusion about LLM's.

Looking forward to the authors next blog post on how after driving one car they find that all cars are slow and uncomfortable. Then the follow up after trying one phone and that all phones have bad cameras and battery life.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#70
> “after four years of open source LLMs, we should have three AirBnBs, two Stripes, and three Dropboxes thanks to the power of AI.”

Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox were created in a different time when the market was much less competitive.

Saturation of software development velocity doesn’t increase large scale product opportunities in the market. It can also mean that opportunities get filled even more quickly by niche players, and nobody gets to grow to Airbnb scale.

IMO the latter is what’s currently happening. AI-powered companies are like little mammals scurrying around between the feet of the dinosaurs, and commentators like the OP look at the evolution of the brontosaurus as evidence that the mammals don’t seem to be growing as they should.

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