Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer

sam.sutch.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 44 posts

Re: I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer

#11

Post by ssutch3 »

upghost wrote: post #8
cheevly wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the irony is that those of us using AI to amplify our output to produce at exponential speeds feel like your comments are gaslighting us instead! Ive never seen such an outright divide in practitioners of a technology in terms of perception and outcomes. I got into LLMs super early, using them daily since 2022; so that may have bolstered the way I’ve augmented my approaches and tooling. Now almost everything I bu…

Can we use this micro moment to try to bridge the gap? I was sold on cocaine but all I've gotten so far was corn starch. Is there like a definitive tutorial on this? I mean look I am proud of my work but if I can drop 200-1000/month for the "blue stuff" I'm not gonna turn my nose up at it. I've been pretty deeply into LLMs myself since 2023 and built several small models myself from scratch and (SFT) trained many mor…

It's going to depend heavily on what you're doing. If you're doing common tasks in popular languages, and not using cutting edge library features, the tools are pretty good at automating a large amount of the code production. Just make sure the context/instruction file (i.e. claude.md) and codebase are set up to properly constrict the bot and you can get away with a lot.

If you're not doing tasks that are statistically common in the training data however you're not going to have a great experience. That being said, very little in software is "novel" anymore so you might be surprised.

Re: I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer

#12

Post by 20after4 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #4

I haven't had nearly the same experience of success with AI. I'm often accused of letting my skepticism hold me back from really trying it properly, and maybe that's true. I certainly could not imagine going months without writing any code, letting the AI just generate it while I prompt My work is pushing these tools hard and it is taking a huge toll on me. I'm constantly hearing how life changing this is, but I cann…

I have a working theory that it's mostly bad programmers who are achieving massive productivity gains. Really good programmers will probably have trouble getting the LLM tools to perform as well as their normal level of output.

This could be cope but I don't think it is.

Re: I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer

#13

Post by bitwize »

Mouvelie wrote: post #3

> Regardless, the lesson for people like myself is that, in order to feel happy with creating, we have to actually create. An artist would not call their work art if they had little to no role in creating it. Thanks. The author touched something there, close to a truth (or deep belief I got ?) about our life, something about the journey mattering more than the destination...

Good. Enjoy that journey... on your own time. You've been missing your productivity OKRs, and your Claude logs say you haven't been using the tools the company has provided. You're on a PIP: if measurable progress is not seen in 30 days, disciplinary action up to and including termination may be taken.

Re: I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer

#15

Post by bluefirebrand »

ssutch3 wrote: post #10
bluefirebrand wrote: post #4

I haven't had nearly the same experience of success with AI. I'm often accused of letting my skepticism hold me back from really trying it properly, and maybe that's true. I certainly could not imagine going months without writing any code, letting the AI just generate it while I prompt My work is pushing these tools hard and it is taking a huge toll on me. I'm constantly hearing how life changing this is, but I cann…

AI coding tools aren't equally effective across all software domains or languages. They're going to be the "best" (relative to their own ability distribution) in the "fat middle" of software engineering where they have the most training data. Popular tasks in popular languages and popular libraries (web dev in React, for example). You're probably out of luck if your task is writing netcode for a game engine, for inst…

I am a web dev in React, though

My experience is in one of the areas that people are saying it is most helpful

Which really just adds to the gaslighting effect

Re: I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer

#16

Post by fithisux »

Mouvelie wrote: post #3

> Regardless, the lesson for people like myself is that, in order to feel happy with creating, we have to actually create. An artist would not call their work art if they had little to no role in creating it. Thanks. The author touched something there, close to a truth (or deep belief I got ?) about our life, something about the journey mattering more than the destination...

Of interest

https://medium.com/@kenichisasagawa/the-reason-behind-develo...

Re: I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer

#17

Post by bluefirebrand »

ssutch3 wrote: post #11
upghost wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we use this micro moment to try to bridge the gap? I was sold on cocaine but all I've gotten so far was corn starch. Is there like a definitive tutorial on this? I mean look I am proud of my work but if I can drop 200-1000/month for the "blue stuff" I'm not gonna turn my nose up at it. I've been pretty deeply into LLMs myself since 2023 and built several small models myself from scratch and (SFT) trained many mor…

It's going to depend heavily on what you're doing. If you're doing common tasks in popular languages, and not using cutting edge library features, the tools are pretty good at automating a large amount of the code production. Just make sure the context/instruction file (i.e. claude.md) and codebase are set up to properly constrict the bot and you can get away with a lot. If you're not doing tasks that are statistical…

Just because it's not strictly novel doesn't mean that the LLM is outputting the right thing

We used to caution people not to copy and paste from StackOverflow without understanding the code snippets, now we have people generating "vibe code" from nothing using AI, never reading it once and pushing it to master?

It feels like an insane fever dream

Re: I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer

#18

Post by bluefirebrand »

20after4 wrote: post #12
bluefirebrand wrote: post #4

I haven't had nearly the same experience of success with AI. I'm often accused of letting my skepticism hold me back from really trying it properly, and maybe that's true. I certainly could not imagine going months without writing any code, letting the AI just generate it while I prompt My work is pushing these tools hard and it is taking a huge toll on me. I'm constantly hearing how life changing this is, but I cann…

I have a working theory that it's mostly bad programmers who are achieving massive productivity gains. Really good programmers will probably have trouble getting the LLM tools to perform as well as their normal level of output. This could be cope but I don't think it is.

I'm not sure if it is cope, but I sort of feel the same

The quality of LLM code is consistently average at best, and usually quite bad imo. People say it is like a junior, but if a junior I hired produced such code consistently and never improved I would be recommending the company PIP them out.

Having output like a Junior would be fine, if I didn't have to fix it myself. As it stands, I've never been able to get it to produce code of the quality I want so I have to spend more time fixing it than I would just writing it.

I dunno. It sucks man

Re: I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer

#19

Post by clown_strike »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #4

I haven't had nearly the same experience of success with AI. I'm often accused of letting my skepticism hold me back from really trying it properly, and maybe that's true. I certainly could not imagine going months without writing any code, letting the AI just generate it while I prompt My work is pushing these tools hard and it is taking a huge toll on me. I'm constantly hearing how life changing this is, but I cann…

You're being gaslit. The point is to make you look unproductive.

The untrained temp workers using AI to do the entirety of their jobs aren't producing code of professional quality, it doesn't adhere to best practices or security unless you monitor that shit like a hawk but if you're still engineering for quality then AI is not the first train you've missed.

They will get code into production quicker and cheaper than you through brute force iteration. Nothing else matters. Best practices went the way of the rest of the social contract the instant feigned competence became cheaper.

Even my podunk employer has AI metrics. You won't escape it. AI will eventually gatekeep all expertise and the future employee becomes just a disposable meat interface (technician) running around doing whatever SHODAN tells them to.

Re: I am uninstalling AI coding assistants from my personal computer

#20

Post by NathanKP »

Mouvelie wrote: post #3

> Regardless, the lesson for people like myself is that, in order to feel happy with creating, we have to actually create. An artist would not call their work art if they had little to no role in creating it. Thanks. The author touched something there, close to a truth (or deep belief I got ?) about our life, something about the journey mattering more than the destination...

I think the author's definition of "creating" is just too narrow. A gardener can get tremendous satisfaction from watching their plants grow from the bed of soil that they prepared, even if there is not as much weeding or watering to do later on in the growth cycle. A parent can get tremendous satisfaction from watching their child continue to grow and develop, even after the child is no longer an infant who requires constant care and attention.

In my opinion, having spent about a year and half working on various coding projects using AI, there are phases to the AI coding lifecycle.

1) Coding projects start out like infants: you need to write a lot of code by hand at first to set the right template and patterns you want the AI to follow going forward.

2) Coding projects continue to develop kind of like garden beds: you have to guide the structure and provide the right "nutrients" for the project, so that the AI can continue to add additional features based on what you have supplied to it.

3) Coding projects mature kind of like children growing up to become adults. A well configured AI agent, starting from a clean, structured code repo, might be mostly autonomous, but just like your adult kid might still need to phone home to Mom and Dad to ask for advice or help, you as the "parent" of the project are still going to be involved when the AI gets stuck and needs help.

Personally, while I can get some joy and satisfaction from manually typing lines of code, most of those lines of code are things I've typed literally hundreds of times over my decades long journey as a developer. There isn't as much joy in typing out the same things again and again, but there is joy in the longer term steering and shaping of a project so that it stays sane, clean, and scalable. I get a similar same sense of joy out of gently steering AI towards success in my projects, that I get from gently steering my own child towards success. There is something incredible about providing the right environment and the right pushes in the right direction, and then seeing something grow and develop mostly on it's own (but with your support backing it up).

Post reply on HN