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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

#141

Post by eudamoniac »

Gigachad wrote: post #101
bwhiting2356 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how does this non dev manager have perms to do this

They don't have permissions but if I don't rush to block the PR with a bunch of review comments, one of the other AI brained devs will just hit approve on it without reading or understanding anything. Yes it is hell here. But it's a new kind of problem that just showed up.

This is so maddening. I'm tech lead and I run a tight ship on the repo I'm in charge of, all PRs unofficially wait for my approval (it's mostly juniors), but if I ever go on PTO, people just approve absolute shit. It is a common occurrence that I come back from vacation and have to get people to revert merges.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#142

Post by eudamoniac »

retsibsi wrote: post #128
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't write it off until you've genuinely seen the upsides. This is ridiculous. Basically you're saying "if you try it and find it sucks, you're wrong, keep at it until you change your mind". That isn't a tool at that point, it's a religion.

Of course you don't need to keep trying until you think it's good. But if you haven't found anything it's good at, and meanwhile lots of smart and seemingly-honest people are saying they've found it to be very good at some things, then it's pretty likely that you really are holding it wrong (and perhaps not even trying to hold it right in the first place).

How do you account for the lots of smart and seemingly-honest people who are saying they've earnestly tried it and find it not useful? These are all just personal accounts. The only empirical evidence we have is the output, but there is conspicuously no big successful AI project taking over anything, which is some minor evidence against.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#143

Post by 1718627440 »

oblio wrote: post #134
1718627440 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like fraud. You claimed you have knowledge of the job you got hired for, but you don't actually have. If the company want's hire someone who doesn't have a clue and only uses SO, that's of course fine, but I doubt, that this is the case.

People gotta eat.

All people do, only few resort to fraud. If you start with that argument, you can rationalize any crime.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#144

Post by solid_fuel »

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?

> Why not use actual frontier models, and you know do some real research, before writing a blog post?

Seems like they've already done more research than you. Their results not matching your expectations does not indicate a lack of research. If you feel they missed something, why don't you go spend your own money on whatever frontier model you want and go publish a post with your own conclusions.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#145

Post by Izkata »

acuozzo wrote: post #129
kqr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a different mindset. Has nothing to do with curiosity. For me and you, "fixing" something means finding which assumption was violated and redesigning the solution in light of that. Sometimes this means adding code, sometimes it means making the solution smaller. For a lot of people, "fixing" means adding code to make it work. This always makes the solution larger. The latter group can still be curious! But they'…

> For a lot of people, "fixing" means adding code to make it work. What if the fix requires deleting a single line of code? Is the additive fix to enshroud it in if (0) { } ?

What I saw in these cases, the result was a few levels removed from the root cause and they'd add the same workaround to like 5 different places (and miss one or two) instead of tracking it back to the origin where the fix was that simple.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#146

Post by apple4ever »

I wish I could quote so much from this. But it encapsulates my issue with AI. Yes it can help. But it's not the end all be all. We still need smart people to make decisions.

Also, AI was build on what people figured out before. What happens when people stop figuring things out? Or stop making it available to AI? We hit a wall.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#147

Post by apple4ever »

bwhiting2356 wrote: post #24
Lapalux wrote: post #2

Pre-AI, the limiter on my bad code was how much code I could type in a day..... Now with AI I can 10x my output and 10x my bad code!

Whoever is giving a bad coder resources and access will eventually stop

I think you underestimate the ... lack of caring by most Director/VP/CxO folks

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#148

Post by bigstrat2003 »

cheeze wrote: post #30
dr_dshiv wrote: 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..…

> in 2026, you aren't able to have an LLM generate decent quality code

Nobody is. The only difference is that some of us are willing to say the emperor has no clothes.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#149

Post by bigstrat2003 »

smokel wrote: post #52
Systemerror7A69 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In this case, the argument is valid though. Only recently have some of the models become powerful enough (for some) to actually be useful in day to day programming, without too much hand-holding. For most, this change occurred with the introduction of Claude Opus, and OpenAI and Google have caught up. Unfortunately, none of the "open" models is at this level yet. The field is moving fast, and asking for scientific ar…

> Only recently have some of the models become powerful enough (for some) to actually be useful in day to day programming, without too much hand-holding.

That still is very much not the case. Every model, yes, including $most_recent_model, needs supervision or you will get burned.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#150

Post by bigstrat2003 »

imtringued wrote: post #87
Systemerror7A69 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> The models got good starting with 2026 and that isn't some attempt at excusing it.

No, they still aren't good.

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