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AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

hermit-tech.com

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Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#71

Post by Gepsens »

padolsey wrote: post #60

Bit of a humbling/jarring moment when I realized that people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do. I mean, it's quite obvious I suppose. But up until now I just assumed it was only a (massive) catalyst for things people would already be able to do with enough time. But nope -- it seems people are right now employed in roles that they would not be able to fulfil the tasks within if AI w…

But if the AI has a blindspot then they will fail hard since they rely on the LLM for everything.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#72

Post by swiftcoder »

kuboble wrote: post #58
rootnod3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Better throw money at 5 different ones and then people come and tell you that you just need MORE agents and throw MORE money at it or you're not doing it right.

I am convinced coding agent makes me extra productive. I'm also convinced the effect would not be there If I had a 10$ budget.

> I'm also convinced the effect would not be there If I had a 10$ budget.

Sure it would be. I pay $10/month to OpenCode for a Go subscription, it's fine for day-to-day coding tasks. I wouldn't necessarily try and one-shot a production app on that budget, but with decent planning and test-driven-development, it gets the job done

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#74

Post by sixeyes »

orwin wrote: post #48

I now started to us AI to help review my juniors PRs, because I couldn't keep up with the amount of code they ship. It started poorly, but now I have my method: I first read the code and flag the lines I'm not sure about, then ask any frontier model (I like Claude here for analysis, even if I don't use it for the rest) to explain the PR and to put effort on the parts I flagged (basically explain in detail the code, n…

>I tell them to try to find what part of the code doesn't work before generating the fix

this makes me kinda sad. they don't do this on their own? are they not even a little curious

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#75

Post by Zakis1 »

big-chungus4 wrote: post #66
Zakis1 wrote: 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

Ryanair is Europe's most popular budget airline. If I fly with them once can I write a blog post now calling all air travel miserable?

My point is, there is a monumental difference between flying Ryanair and Emirates First Class for example.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#76

Post by Ampersander »

padolsey wrote: post #60

Bit of a humbling/jarring moment when I realized that people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do. I mean, it's quite obvious I suppose. But up until now I just assumed it was only a (massive) catalyst for things people would already be able to do with enough time. But nope -- it seems people are right now employed in roles that they would not be able to fulfil the tasks within if AI w…

All those programmers who could not write fizzbuzz can ship something now.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#77

Post by dmos62 »

AI does make me suck more, which is a good thing. It sped me up and has me iterating on things in 3 days that normally would have taken me more than a month to do. Surprise, surprise: I'm discovering that I have a lot of blind spots and false presumptions about what good programming is. My understanding of the craft is patchy, but that wasn't as noticable when going at the speed of human-programming.

It's like cars. If you only ever drive at 30 km/h, a 30 yo car, that had its last oil change in 2008, might be great. But, if, in the same car, you start driving at 200 km/h, you might notice that there's a lot of room for improvement. My programmer-self is the 30 yo car in this metaphor.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#78

Post by benrutter »

> Borrowing Disesdi's logic in their arithmetic (which is hard to argue against), after four years of open source LLMs, we should have three AirBnBs,1 two Stripes,2 and three Dropboxes3 thanks to the power of AI. > > So. Where the fuck are they?

I think this is a great question, and I have a completely unqualified theory.

I work in a fairly specialised field, I've notice when I use AI to try to generate code in fields where I'm very experienced, it produces a worse output at a slower rate than I can produce manually[0].

When I use it in fields I'm not an expert in by any stretch, like webdev, genAI massively improves my output by a huge factor.

I think this makes the productivity gains a little fuzzy. Claude code makes me 10x faster at webdev, but I'd be a very slow webdev. Ultimately, the next innovation in a field, will probably be from an expert in that field, and they therefore won't see the kind of "10x productivity boost" that non-experts do.

[0] I still find AI helpful for exploring code etc, just not so much producing output.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#79

Post by Ampersander »

Marazan wrote: post #14
blfr wrote: post #4

There are some good points, and I ask the question of where is the ground breaking stuff myself, but severely weakened by * stretching the timeline: the actual real programming ability appeared in LLMs in the last 6-8 months, not 3-4 years, * using the weakest possible tool: and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits that is a far cry from Claude with Fable. Also, I know nothing about marathons but for most uses putt…

I remember being told in early 2025 that only now has "real programming ability" appeared in LLMs. And since then there's been 3 more "now real programming ability has been made available and previous stuff was just toy examples" cycles (summer 2025, winter 2025 and spring 2026) Looking forward to the next "everything before this was trivial and bad, here's the good stuff" moment

Yeah, it's interesting how the current thing is always the end of programming, but then when a new thing comes it turns into absolute trash that can't be used for anything.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#80

Post by tlamponi »

padolsey wrote: post #60

Bit of a humbling/jarring moment when I realized that people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do. I mean, it's quite obvious I suppose. But up until now I just assumed it was only a (massive) catalyst for things people would already be able to do with enough time. But nope -- it seems people are right now employed in roles that they would not be able to fulfil the tasks within if AI w…

  > people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do
FWIW, this is not exactly new; those same people were just using other sources like Stack Overflow, blog posts, etc. before, cobbling together random code snippets, libraries, and so on without actually understanding any of that at a relevant detail level.

Sure, with LLMs, one can naturally tailor this much closer to the current need (or at least the need one thinks they have) and iterate ("spew") faster, but it's not a new phenomenon in general.

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