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AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

hermit-tech.com

81–90 of 183 posts

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#81
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…

[deleted]

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#82
When I do use it, I try to only use it to do things I can already do.

I don’t want to solve a new problem with an LLM programming assistant anyways - that’s the fun part of my work, why would I get rid of it?

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#83
How you use AI as a person who can actually code is up to you.

You can use AI in two ways, either…

1. set the plane on autopilot and arrive at the destination having no idea how you got there - like any old idiot who can type a prompt. And also pay a very expensive air fare for this super power auto pilot.

2. You can pilot the plane yourself. Plan the route in advance. Set waypoints. Make decisions along the way. And land the plane manually. And the reward is you know the route and you pay 1/10 the cost.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#84
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the failure is in trying only one model / one prompt.

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.

The cheapest coding subscription is $20 and you can get a refund if you cancel within 7 days.

Actually, I lied, Codex is free and I developed my first AI written application using it and the free tier limits were generous enough to work on it for several months.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#85
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…

where do u work that even hires juniors lol

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#86

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…

aka there are a lot more bullshit artists around these days

i know of several engineers who produce absolute slop and who probably would have produced nothing at all in pre AI times (which would have been preferable) and probably let go or never hired (even better).

they impose such an enormous drag on productivity that they more than wipe out any gains from people using the tools responsibly.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#87
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…

Even as someone using AI on the regular I'm starting to hate the "You didn't actually use this exact most expensive model so your point is invalid" argument. This is fair to say if someones last experience with AI was copy-pasting code into GPT3 chat windows years ago, but Deepseek is a more than capabale model and enough for someone to get an informed opinion about the technology. If people have actual counter argum…

The models got good starting with 2026 and that isn't some attempt at excusing it. Companies like OpenAI started building dedicated models around their coding harness called Codex, there was gpt-5.3-codex and it was both cheaper and better at using the harness than the regular models. Then they started merging the two model types into their main release models. All of this happened like 6 months ago.

You don't have to pay money to use Codex, there is a very generous free tier that costs you nothing, you just have to accept being told you're out of tokens every day. Because your token limits are low, you need to make sure that you accept or reject everything manually and when it tells you that it wants to run a command you have to paste in the command into your terminal and only paste the relevant output back otherwise it floods the context window.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#88

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…

I wonder how much of this "simple but bespoke" stuff would be better served with some customized off the shelf software rather than a vibe coded tool.

There's not a lot of software where users dont really care if it goes wrong.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#89

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…

Yeh but I also mean outside of software engineering. Within the gamut of 'being a programmer' it seems fair to bleed into adjacent areas without too much cheek. We've all done it; it's part of the learning curve. But I was talking more about people in other knowledge work who have to come up with a lot of prose-like material about {insert thing}. Marketing, consultants, PMs, or even domain-specific analysts, .. ya know, the types of office jobs where people basically write emails, attend meetings, discuss reports, and produce mostly text-or-data artefacts all day long.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#90

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…

I think this is fine as long as the success criteria are strict enough that they are forced to learn something in the end.

Any significant testing will inevitably create that situation. The LLM won't have enough context to handle the more precise business requirements. The dev will have to read the code carefully and make their changes by hand. Additional rounds of testing may cause thrashing between regressed states until something clicks for the developer. That lightbulb going off is called "learning" and they are human after all!

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