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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

#161

Post by sublinear »

oblio wrote: post #135
sublinear wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think this is fine as long as the success criteria are strict enough that they are forced to learn something in the end. They are fired, get promoted to management, or learn the technical aspects.

Promotion into management isn't so different. They still experience similar thrashing and have to learn or be fired.

My point was not only that so much human learning happens out-of-band, but that it has to be fundamentally different from how an LLM builds context. I've never seen an LLM overcome the thrashing on its own. There's never any "lightbulb moment".

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#162

Post by joquarky »

grebc wrote: post #156
cheesecakegood wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve long been curious what you (and a lot of people that express this) feel the cutoff is to know how to code? Because obviously there’s a sliding scale between truly knowing very little, being able to adapt similar work, extensive modifications, coding everything from scratch, etc. on top of understanding certain programming concepts and organization.

Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI is probably where I’d draw the line. Not everything you touch when you know how to code is doing the whole thing, but I’d expect you’d be able to piece it all together with some time and docs. Pick your own platform that suits too, I’m not saying iOS or Windows only. For context to my above comment re university cour…

> Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI

If companies would start hiring people who are fully experienced and qualified but can't do the monkey dance of performing live coding, maybe they would find these types of programmers again...

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#164

Post by SwtCyber »

Gigachad wrote: post #8
lelanthran wrote: post #7

Previously, the limit on bad code entering any serious product was gated by having devs that at least knew how to change what they copied from SO. Seriously, that was the lowest level of skill I saw in 30 years of development. Now we have people who can't even do that proudly showing off PRs to widely used products. "B-b-but I do the systems design and hard thinking". Sure, buddy.

At least once a week I have to drop what I'm doing and race in to stop the non dev manager from merging a fully vibe coded patch which will blow up production. Claude Code has made this guy a negative 10x developer.

Just let him take down prod on a friday night once and leave him to deal with the PagerDuty alerts solo. Cures the urge to vibe-code infrastructure real fast

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#165

Post by SwtCyber »

terhechte wrote: post #46
reconnecting wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure DeepSeek isn't the point here. You can change the name to whatever you prefer and the article still holds. Actually, I think the author put DeepSeek on purpose to avoid the obvious ChatGPT/Claude comparison — because whatever he chose, there would be a question of why model A and not B, while the point of the article isn't about models comparison at all .

It is the point. Also open source model enthusiast tell you otherwise, there is a coding quality gap between these models. If I use DeepSeek, I do so knowing that I have to limit to simpler tasks on smaller, well specified prompts. What the author did, letting the model do the planning, is not something DeepSeek will excel at. I'm using GPT (Terra, Sol, Luna), Claude (Opus 5, Fable), Qwen 3.8 and GLM 5.3 Flash daily…

There’s a night-and-day difference between frontier and budget models, no question. But the issue isn't the tooling at all : if you put someone who doesn't know the rules of the road on a $15k carbon road bike, they're just gonna slam into a telephone pole at 30 mph instead of 6 mph

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#166

Post by Quothling »

reconnecting wrote: post #113
Quothling wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they are opposite. We still don't let AI run anything we do. That being said, things have changed. 4 months ago I wouldn't touch the M365 Copilot thing if you paid me to, now it's basically the only AI I use professionally. Cowork changed the way we work, and I've previously spoken about how I think Microsoft sort of won the AI enterprise "war" by selling the tools and not the mode. If you'd asked me a…

What you're telling me now is that in the short period of 4 months, an American corporation took an employee of a company the EU relies on for critical matters from "wouldn't touch it if you paid me" to outsourcing thinking. Well, I'm speechless.

Are you purposely twisting things to fit a certain narrative?

If you really want to go into it, I've previously talked about how we used AI tools provided to us by one of our major investors who do so for all the companies they are invested into. These were also Anthropic and OpenAI models. The main difference is that Cowork has access to files on a users one drive (and that we get a lot more control over what goes into it).

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#167

Post by Quothling »

ozlikethewizard wrote: post #112
Quothling wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you should keep AI away from software development for security reasons. We're in the European economic area and are completely NIS2 compliant and we use LLM's to aid in our software development for high risk systems. None of that is vibe coded though, so it's not like I disagree with you either. As you point out this portal isn't that, but what protects us is the processes around compliance. This can't…

Denial of Service is still an issue whether its from an external attack or spaghetti soup code bug. Outcome for your users is the same. From my perspective it looks like were just allowing hostile developers within our environments now lol.

Your perspective is correct. We call them shadow developers, but it's a massive issue and security threat. The more tools Microsoft adds to their AI admin center (and put behind that ridicilous Agent365 DLC license) the more we see just how big of an issue it has become. People are using their personal credit cards to buy AI tools and use them wildly irresponsible.

In the big threat picture a vibe coded web tool that's not on the internet and runs in total isolation on it's own management group on the "this might get hacked" tenant in Azure is nothing though. I'd worry more about all that OT which was compromised from the factory which sits around in the energy sector. Especially because it's very easy to draw you a risk analysis that will tell you that unless you're running a Nuclear Powerplant then it makes no financial sense to secure your stuff. The audits are so rare and the consequences so low that it's cheaper to just pay the fine (if you ever get one).

Most actual security happens when someone on the ground decides that it's just too stupid that something clearly labeled "DO NOT PUT ON THE INTERNET" was put directly on the internet.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#168

Post by grebc »

a34729t wrote: post #160
grebc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned this then other day, my university class had maybe 80% of people who could not code. No joke. And a lot have gone onto to code professionally. AI is a godsend to this cohort of code monkies. Edit: we graduated in 2006.

At a FAANG adjacent company in 2017 we hired a guy from Google with 4 years experience who passed our very hard coding interviews. He literally couldnt code. It blew my mind.

I’m sure any profession has this issue.

My families business is bookkeeping, they hired someone who graduated with an accounting degree. They didn’t grasp the basics of bookkeeping nor accounting once employed.

You’d think Google who my understanding pride themselves on technical chops would weed this out with all the interviews they do. But maybe it’s just big places have more cracks for people slip into.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#169

Post by hypfer »

grebc wrote: post #156
cheesecakegood wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve long been curious what you (and a lot of people that express this) feel the cutoff is to know how to code? Because obviously there’s a sliding scale between truly knowing very little, being able to adapt similar work, extensive modifications, coding everything from scratch, etc. on top of understanding certain programming concepts and organization.

Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI is probably where I’d draw the line. Not everything you touch when you know how to code is doing the whole thing, but I’d expect you’d be able to piece it all together with some time and docs. Pick your own platform that suits too, I’m not saying iOS or Windows only. For context to my above comment re university cour…

> Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI is probably where I’d draw the line.

Wasn't the workflow there always to take the example code of whatever library or framework it was and then customize it?

I could definitely never start a react or android or c# or whatever application from scratch with no resources. Nor would I want to because why.

Works with C I guess though. Given that the contract is so small.

But that also breaks down the moment you want to write C for some uC, and then there's tons of boilerplate again you just pull from the sdk example.

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